Salle de classe | EPFL Graph Search

Une salle de classe ou salle de cours est une salle destinée à accueillir les élèves. Elle se trouve dans les écoles, collèges, ou les universités. On y pratique l'enseignement. Une salle de classe contient du mobilier scolaire. Histoire Au Moyen Âge, l'enseignement ce déroule dans les églises et cathédrales sous la tutelle du clergé. Cette méthode est appliquée jusqu'à la renaissance, où les maîtres commencent à ouvrir les premières écoles et collèges privés. Les classes regroupent des enfants de tous les âges. À la campagne, le manque de moyen pousse les enseignants à faire l'école dans une salle dédiée dans leur logement. Durant le XIXe siècle, la démocratisation de l'école oblige à réfléchir à un nouveau mode de fonctionnement, les élèves sont séparés par âge, afin de facilité leur apprentissage. Configuration architecturale vignette|Un cours de biologie à l'Alliance High School au Kenya en mars 2008. Une salle de classe est généralement de forme recta

Ambient Awareness for the Orchestration of Collaborative Problem Solving

Hamed Seiied Alavi

Classroom orchestration refers to the teacher's (or tutor's) responsibility to identify and manage the evolving learning opportunities and constraints, in real-time. We study the use of computer technology to support this orchestration task in a multi-constraint pedagogical practice: "recitation section". In university teaching, recitation sections complement lecture sessions by providing an opportunity for students to practice the course material in teams, under the supervision of the tutors. We start by analyzing recitation sections as they are held in our university and identify the causes of their inefficiencies. We show that lack of information on the progress and the current status of the students makes the orchestration task difficult for the tutors, and on the students' side results in a hesitation to interact with their peers. Thus, we propose an ambient awareness tool that makes this information available. Our tool, called Lantern, is an interactive lamp which is placed on each group's table that shows its status, namely the specific exercise that the group is currently working on, if assistance is needed, and, if so, for how long this assistance has been needed. Several questions are raised about how Lantern can facilitate the orchestration task and increase collaboration within and between teams. To answer these questions, we describe two user studies. In the first study, we show how Lantern can help the tutors share their resources between teams, enhance students' productivity, increase collaboration among students, and improve the structure of inter-team communication. In the second study, we compare Lantern with another tool, Shelf, which provides the same information but on a single screen in front of the classroom. It appears that Shelf, instead of encouraging collaboration, creates a competitive atmosphere among students. We relate the differences between Lantern and Shelf as to how they position the displayed information in the classroom space. In a second version of Lantern, the lamps are equipped with a wireless communication module that connects them to a server. The server receives every user action and controls the lamps by specifying what should be displayed on each of them. This allows for flexibility both in terms of the variety of the learning scripts that Lantern can implement and also in terms of integration with other technologies inside and outside of the classroom. Finally, we explore the possibilities of using Lantern in other learning contexts, such as high school courses, training workshops, or open learning spaces.

EPFL2012

Iterative Classroom Teaching

Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Volkan Cevher, Pierre Dillenbourg, Louis Pierre Faucon, Arpit Merchant, Shuqing Teresa Yeo

We consider the machine teaching problem in a classroom-like setting wherein the teacher has to deliver the same examples to a diverse group of students. Their diversity stems from differences in their initial internal states as well as their learning rates. We prove that a teacher with full knowledge about the learning dynamics of the students can teach a target concept to the entire classroom using O (min {d, N} log 1/epsilon) examples, where d is the ambient dimension of the problem, N is the number of learners, and epsilon is the accuracy parameter. We show the robustness of our teaching strategy when the teacher has limited knowledge of the learners' internal dynamics as provided by a noisy oracle. Further, we study the trade-off between the learners' workload and the teacher's cost in teaching the target concept. Our experiments validate our theoretical results and suggest that appropriately partitioning the classroom into homogenous groups provides a balance between these two objectives.

ASSOC ADVANCEMENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Tangible Interfaces for Learning

Sébastien Cuendet

There have been many claims that Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) can have a positive impact on learning. Alleged benefits include increasing usability, improving engagement and collaboration of students, and providing a better perception of the task, especially spatial ones. However, there exists little empirical data to back up these claims. Moreover, for all their potential benefits for learning, TUIs are still scarcely used in schools. This thesis explores these two issues in the specific context of vocational education and training of carpenter apprentices. The learning objectives concern spatial skills and in particular, the mapping between 2D and 3D representations. We study (1) whether TUIs can support the training of spatial skills, and if so what features allow them to do so, and (2) what kinds of classroom pedagogical scenarios TUIs can support. We follow a design-based research approach and run empirical studies, mostly in classrooms. The contributions of this thesis touch on three research domains:

Spatial skills. Our results show that TUIs can help teach spatial skills to carpenter apprentices. The tangible nature of TUIs can help the learner relate multiple representations of an object, especially for difficult problems. It can also lower the barrier to entry into a learning domain for beginners.
Learning with TUIs. According to our results, TUIs can benefit learning, but the mere fact of using TUIs does not guarantee learning. Instead, special attention needs to be given to the design of the TUI. Small design variations, such as the physical correspondence between the tangible object and its virtual representations, or the type and timing of feedback given to the user, can have a significant impact on learning.
Classroom technologies and orchestration. We explore several classroom pedagogical scenarios that TUIs can support. The most promising one is to use a TUI as part of a hybrid classroom learning activity that includes both TUI and non TUI steps. Additionally, we devise two ways to promote the integration of TUIs in classroom. First, we introduce 5 design principles that reduce the classroom orchestration load. Second, we show how new web technologies can be used to deploy TUIs in schools at a lower cost.

EPFL2013