Research paper-presentation and poster at the 23rd European Conference on e-Learning, Porto, October 2024

The research teams of UniWA and Valladolid universities presented the paper 

“Supporting Educators to Co-Design Interdisciplinary Projects Integrating Educational Robotics and Arts”,

available at DOI: 10.34190/ecel.23.1.2641 

The paper presented the project’s main aim of supporting educators in co-designing interdisciplinary projects integrating Educational Robotics (ER) and Arts. It overviewed the “FERTILE” Learning Design methodology as a conceptual tool scaffolding the integration of discipline-oriented viewpoints while educators co-design. Also, it presented the “FERTILE” Community Platform as an online environment scaffolding educators in designing interdisciplinary projects based on the “FERTILE” Learning Design methodology.
The paper explored how the authoring functionalities of the “FERTILE” Community Platform supported educators in designing interdisciplinary learning, reporting on a pilot study conducted with Greek and Spanish educators. In this study, we applied a mixed-method research design with a quantitative strand adopting indicators from the Usability Metric for User Experience (UMUX) model and a qualitative strand providing insights into participants’ perceptions. The findings indicated that scaffolding disciplinary elaboration (e.g., robot technical requirements and art forms) and systematising interdisciplinary context (e.g., through project categories) may trigger educators’ mutual understanding. The participants endorsed authoring functionalities that adopted high contextualisation levels for learning design representation to communicate their design ideas across disciplinary boundaries. Also, the participants valued CT skills as the primary outcome of interdisciplinary learning, indicating that CT skills’ cultivation may be the broker among disciplines and trigger educators to overcome disciplinary barriers.