Last year I have followed the course IN4307: Medical Visualization, which resulted in a final mark of 8 out of 10. The docent of the course, C.P. Botha, however, asked a fellow student, André van Dixhoorn, and me if we would like to combine our work in one paper and submit this to VCBM 2010 to see if we could get through.
Today, I have been to my first lecture of the course IN4145: Educational Software. Time went quick and I think I can use quite a good deal of the information presented in this course. The course is basically covering the following points:
- Educational Principles
- Design of educational software such as electronic instruction manuals, serious gaming, VR training, drills, and tutor agents and tutorials
- Educational software for specific learners such as children, elderly, mentally or physically challenged individuals
- Evaluation of education software
Which, in the end, will be evaluated by an oral exam, some presentations, and some course work.
To pass the course work, each group has to design and implement a small but executable and usable piece of educational software. First the subject matter, the learning objectives and the user group has to be chosen. Teams are free to choose their subject, and create an outline which has to be presented in class. The next decision is to choose a didactical strategy, an instructional design and a toolset for the implementation. Although several development environment exist, the objective of this module is not learning to use these tools, but to designing and implementing the educational software.
The coming week I will spend some of my time on coming with a nice concept for a piece of educational software. If you have any ideas feel free to comment here, or tweet or email me.
Well, since all Blogs need a first post this will be mine. In the coming days making weeks, and months containing those weeks, and if you are lucky, even a year containing those months again, I will update this blog in various ways.
The first sort of updates are the most important ones. Information, meaning I will post various topics here concerning my master thesis, field of study (some overlap here), and just simple brain noise I have to drop somewhere which contain more characters than my Twitter can handle.
The second thing I hope to do is change this simple wordpress with a basic theme into something more challenging, providing a better read. But rome isn’t built in one day, and to translate directly from Dutch to English (which gives very funny sentences): “Fast runners are dead runners”.
I hope this is enough for a first post, soon more posts will follow showing actual things you want to read……at least, I hope.