Section: Dissemination

Popularization

Members of the team participate on a regular basis, to scientific awareness and mediation actions:

• Erwan Kerrien heads the local Scientific Mediation Committee. Among other activites, he was invited to last Didapro5-DidaSTIC conference (didactics of computer science) as a panelist and was an associate researcher to a MATh.en.JEANS workshop.

• Pierre-Frédéric Villard participated to various activities in the IUT of Saint-Dié des Vosges: open days, science festival, science café, Film screening following by a debate and computer science presentations to schoolgirls to promote science.

• In an exploratory experiment conducted in collaboration with the IUFM de Lorraine (teacher training institute), we investigated the use, the usefulness and the impact of an innovative Augmented Reality Environment for teaching/learning astronomy at primary school [15] . An AR learning environment has been designed whose aim is to show augmented views of some celestial bodies and support the pupils’ investigations using spatial visual guides and views from a terrestrial observer. Each child was asked to solve problems related to astronomy in two different conditions in which they had to use and manipulate: (1) the traditional learning environment (i.e., with physical models), or (2) the Augmented Reality environment. Preliminary results show that the declarative knowledge related to astronomy was higher with the AR Environment. Only AR users have developed scientific conceptions of the explored astronomical phenomena and learnings have been significantly improved. Furthermore, we presented some arguments in order to support the assumption that the AR model assists the process of scaffolding, promotes collaborative learning by reducing cognitive load, and takes part to the motivation dynamic by enhancing task controllability.

• We have designed and developed a software whose aim is to support students with learning computer programming. This software, named artEoz, enables a pedagogical view of the computer memory, dynamically changing while the user program is running [26] . Using a nice visualization helps to understand the behavior on an object oriented program. This software concerns beginners as well experimented students thanks to its facilities to draw complex data structures. artEoz can be freely downloaded for academic use only from http://arteoz.loria.fr . This software is licensed by the APP (French agency for software protection).