In this paper, we describe an approach for designing and developing technological solutions to support teachers in creating their own outdoor teaching activities. We elaborate on one particular case, TriGO, in which primary school students perform outdoor tasks to experience concepts and constructions in the field of mathematics. The application designs and an initial evaluation of the developed technological solutions is provided based on the results obtained from school activities performed with more than 10 teachers and 50 students.
During the last 5 years, our research group has conducted research studies with the focus of TEL to be applied
within the field of mathematics and with special interest in geometry
From our previous experiences, we have learnt that mobile technologies can support a reflection and
discussion process that allows the students to understand concepts in the field of geometry, and teachers have
shown capability to make efficient use of the provided software
We want to create an ICT solution that supports seamless learning across locations and devices in order to
encompass informal (outdoor phase) and formal (indoor follow-up phase) learning phases
Although technological tools for education are designed to support achieving specific learning goals, teachers still need to customize the tools to their specific settings. In the case of TriGO, the application requires specifying the location in which the activity will take place, in order to define the coordinates of six landmarks that are used for the triangulation tasks. To facilitate this process, we have developed a web-based authoring tool (Fig. 1-a) that allows teachers to specify the activity location in a map using simple interaction methods (such as drag and drop, search for addresses, rotate and zoom) without requiring any programming skills. These functionalities guarantee that the activity takes place at the exact desired location. The created activity can later be displayed to introduce the students to the activity (Fig. 1-a).
After specifying the context of the activity, fourteen activity settings XML files are created. Each XML file is used by the mobile application as a configuration file to run the activity on the field. These files are divided into two sections. The first section reflects the customization of the activity that the teacher has defined via the authoring tool. This section specifies the location of the six markers on the field (see Fig. 1-a). The second section contains a list of 10 points (and their distances to the markers in the first section) that the students need to find through triangulation. The ten points in this second part reflect a dedicated study in mathdidactics to select tasks that are both challenging and promote exploration and reflection. The fourteen activity settings files have equivalent pedagogical tasks, but their design has been studied to avoid simultaneous coincidences. This prevents that the students mimic their colleagues’ actions and requires them to reason about their own performance. The authoring tool also offers a Dashboard environment for the management and coordination of the groups. It allows monitoring that the XML files are downloaded by the students via the mobile application in order to ensure that the Experimentation phase will be able to take place.
The second tool in TriGO (Fig. 1-b) offers capabilities for mobility and exploration that the students
require for the Experimentation phase, i.e. spatial orientation and triangulation tasks. During the execution of
this phase, the mobile application uses the GPS module to get the students geo-location and calculate the
student’s distance from the landmarks on the field. The interested reader can find more information regarding
the mobile application design and behavior at
The third and last tool refers to the Reflection phase. The main objective of this phase is to support
discussions and reflections through two visualization techniques (Fig. 1-c). This tool has been conceptualized to
show the actions performed during the outdoors activity. In order to do so, this tool requires the activity log
generated by the mobile application. On the left side (Fig. 1-c), the tool is designed to present the information in
a numerical way. Using a tree structure that organizes the multiple attempts in group-activity-task-attempt, the
students can observe the different measurements that they performed during the Experimentation phase. On the
right side, the tool present the information graphically on a map, which supports the numeric values with
contextual (location) information. Having the different actions plotted in a map can be helpful for describing the
actions that the students executed during the outdoors activity
The development of the three blocks of the TriGO application has been performed at different stages and following an iterative development method. Therefore, we have run assessment studies independently for each one of the three blocks of the activity in order to study their usability.
The authoring tool created for TriGO was developed guided by the results obtained from a prior study in the use of generic authoring tools. In a prior study, a generic authoring tool was presented in several workshops with a total of 29 teachers in the area of Kronoberg, Sweden. Through the study, we aimed at identifying, first, the user’s experiences in using web technologies for designing activities and, second, their specific needs for creating learning activities. The results showed that teachers with limited technical skills rapidly learned how to make use of the authoring tool functionalities and did not have difficulties to use the web-technologies to design their own learning activities. The TriGO authoring tool was later presented to a group of ten teachers from different regions in Sweden. The results from this presentation were also aligned to our prior experiences demonstrating authoring tools, which demonstrates that the web-based solution is a convenient approach for letting teachers design their own learning activities and enables them to coordinate the preparation for the outdoor phase via the dashboard. Additionally, the web-based solution reduces potential application installation issues. It is important to notice that teachers in schools may not have administration privileges that could be required to install some new learning applications.
The mobile application has evolved through the case studies we performed during the last 5 years
However, in two cases, the mobile devices provided inaccurate GPS locations that lead to incorrect
distance values that did not reflect real distances on the field. In these cases, the students demanded the teacher’s
involvement to assist them with the mobile application or to reassign them to other teams. An alternative
approach to deal with failing resources consists on implementing auto-recovery mechanisms that correct
undesired device status, as presented in
The concepts regarding the visualization tool have been studied through the two sessions that followed the Experimentation phase, which were also recorded for later analysis. For these sessions, we used Google Earth to provide the visualization needed for the discussions. The visualizations were presented on a whiteboard via a projector. For the sessions, we did not offer prior recommendations to the teachers in how to use the visualization tools in their discussions. For the session with 4th grade students, the visualization tool was used to show the different attempts on the map. The tool was supportive for the students presenting their ideas and referring to actions that they did on the field. The teacher could lead the conversations by selecting which specific student cases should be displayed and encouraging all the students to go to the whiteboard for presenting their ideas. In comparison, the tool was used in a different manner in the session with the 6 th grade students. The discussions led by the teacher were based only on the numerical representation of the actions (left side of the visualization tool), and no interactions were done on the map representation. For this group of students, the numerical visualization fits better with the curriculum and increases the level of abstraction that it is required for discussing mathematical concepts.
In this paper, we have presented an approach for designing technological solutions to support teachers in
creating their own outdoor teaching activities. These activities support a seamless learning experience across
locations, times and devices via the combination of mobile and web technologies. Based on our experiences, we
have defined a set of guidelines that can be useful for software developers to design applications that support
seamless learning across locations, time and devices. We advocate the use of web-based authoring tool solutions
to allow teachers to create, adopt and adapt learning activities that connect the physical and the digital worlds.
Connecting these authoring tools to mobile devices can make seamless transitions across locations and devices
and offer the users the possibility to explore learning context in informal settings. The same way, mobile devices
should allow seamless connections back to web-technologies, in order to bring spaces for students to have
common reflection and discussions. Furthermore, we suggest the use of visualization tools that offer several
types of data presentation method. Our Experimentation phase demonstrated to be supportive for the
pedagogical discussions and complementary in their purposes, and the two data presentation methods using in
our visualization tool have allowed the teachers to direct the discussions using different strategies that fit the
needs for each particular group of students. The outcomes of our efforts show also that the combination of these
technologies can simplify the challenges that teachers currently face while desiring to create activities that cover
their specific needs. This combination benefits from using the particular strengths of each complementary
technology. Additionally, web-based solutions remove the need to install additional software on the teacher’s
personal computer, school computers or the used mobile devices. Regarding these application interfaces, these
should be designed to be simple and responsive, in order to avoid disturbing the learning objectives of the
activity. Finally, the application robustness is a critical aspect that must be considered and it can be addressed by
means of using auto-recovery mechanisms as presented in