Alphabet latin | EPFL Graph Search

alt=|vignette|350x350px|Distribution de l'alphabet latin. L'alphabet latin' est un alphabet bicaméral comportant vingt-six lettres de base, principalement utilisé pour écrire les langues d’Europe de l'Ouest, d'Europe du Nord et d'Europe centrale, ainsi que les langues de nombreux pays qui ont été exposés à une forte influence européenne, notamment à travers la colonisation européenne des Amériques, de l'Afrique et de l'Océanie. Présentation générale Considéré comme système d'écriture par défaut dans le monde occidental, il a pour origine l'alphabet grec , premier alphabet utilisé en Europe et dont dérivent tous les alphabets européens, dont le cyrillique et l'étrusque. En 2002, les utilisateurs de l’alphabet latin représentaient 39 % de la population mondiale, consommaient 72 % de la production imprimée et écrite sur papier dans le monde, et profitaient de 84 % de l’ensemble des connexions à Internet. En raison de cette importance historique démographique, économique et cu

Blending a MOOCs with interactive teaching

Pierre-Yves Gilliéron, Bertrand Merminod, Geoffrey Vincent

When Massive Open Online Courses became a hot topic in Europe. The Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) decided to take the challenge and launched an internal call for proposals. At the Geodetic Engineering Lab, we saw a possibility to use contact hours for exercises and fieldwork, rather than telling stories and showing diagrams. External students were considered, but the main purpose was to modernise the first year course "Fundamentals of Geomatics" for approximately 250 civil and environmental engineering students. As the bid was successful, we started with the design of the lectures, followed by the recording sessions in a special studio. Combining photographs, sketches, speeches and quizzes into a video requires a precise script. For one hour of teaching, ten hours of preparation and processing are not always sufficient. The new formula for the course was implemented during the 2014 spring semester. The two hour session remained in the weekly program, with more assistants and other expectations. Regular students took classical mid-term and final exams. At this stage, an incidence of the teaching method on the level reached cannot be ascertained, but neither a miracle, nor a catastrophe took place. Simultaneously, the course was made available worldwide via the Coursera platform. Many people watched the short teaser. Some registered, but few of them did all the assignments and qualified for the statement of accomplishment (issued by Coursera, not EPFL). The activity level of the website was monitored. Some elements of evaluation by the students have been analysed. Reactions are widely spread, from "Bring back the professor!" to "Why not 100% MOOC?". Surely, the second edition will bring a more balanced feedback and motivate some improvements. Having opted for a blended approach, the active promotion of this course outside - Western Africa comes first to mind - depends on partnerships with local universities.

2015

CoWriting Kazakh: Transitioning to a New Latin Script using Social Robots

Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal, Pierre Dillenbourg

In the Republic of Kazakhstan, the transition from Cyrillic towards Latin alphabet raises challenges to teach the whole population in writing the new script. This paper presents a CoWriting Kazakh system that aims to implement an autonomous behavior of a social robot that would assist children in learning a new script. Considering the fact that the current generation of primary school children have to be fluent in both Kazakh scripts, this exploratory study aims to investigate which learning approach provides better effect. Participants were asked to teach a humanoid robot NAO how to write Kazakh words using one of the scripts, Latin vs Cyrillic. We hypothesize that it is more effective when a child mentally converts the word to Latin in comparison to having the robot perform conversion itself. The findings reject this hypothesis, but further research is needed as it is suggested that the way the pre-test was performed might have caused the obtained results.

IEEE2019

A Comparison of Social Robot to Tablet and Teacher in a New Script Learning Context

Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal, Pierre Dillenbourg

This research occurred in a special context where Kazakhstan's recent decision to switch from Cyrillic to the Latin-based alphabet has resulted in challenges connected to teaching literacy, addressing a rare combination of research hypotheses and technical objectives about language learning. Teachers are not necessarily trained to teach the new alphabet, and this could result in a challenge for children with learning difficulties. Prior research studies in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) have proposed the use of a robot to teach handwriting to children (Hood et al., 2015; Lemaignan et al., 2016). Drawing on the Kazakhstani case, our study takes an interdisciplinary approach by bringing together smart solutions from robotics, computer vision areas, and educational frameworks, language, and cognitive studies that will benefit diverse groups of stakeholders. In this study, a human-robot interaction application is designed to help primary school children learn both a newly-adopted script and also its handwriting system. The setup involved an experiment with 62 children between the ages of 7-9 years old, across three conditions: a robot and a tablet, a tablet only, and a teacher. Based on the paradigm-learning by teaching-the study showed that children improved their knowledge of the Latin script by interacting with a robot. Findings reported that children gained similar knowledge of a new script in all three conditions without gender effect. In addition, children's likeability ratings and positive mood change scores demonstrate significant benefits favoring the robot over a traditional teacher and tablet only approaches.

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2020

Blending a MOOCs with interactive teaching

Pierre-Yves Gilliéron, Bertrand Merminod, Geoffrey Vincent

2015