Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T12:49:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T14:02:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / O desenvolvimento tecnológico e a ampliação da infra-estrutura das telecomunicações propiciou um aumendo do número de usuários na Internet. Dentre as imensas possibilidades de utilização, a aprendizagem constitui-se num dos temas mais atrativos. A aprendizagem à distância – EAD consolida-se como uma opção atrativa ao considerar-se principalmente as variáveis custo e comodidade. O trabalho visa avaliar alguns modelos para educação a distância e desenvolver um modelo para instituições de ensino.. Inicialmente, busca-se ampliar o conhecimento teórico acerca do tema com pesquisas bibliográficas que envolvem temas como a Internet, a tecnologia, modelos internacionais e nacionais e o processo de aprendizagem. A etapa seguinte, promove o desenvolvimento de modelos, utilizando a técnica da prototipação de modelos de ensino à distância, nesta etapa são consideradas como vertentes: tecnologia, mercado, cliente e metodologia utilizada. Os modelos são apresentados e analisados qualitativamente e seqüencialmente, sob o prisma dos seus pontos fortes e pontos fracos, os resultados são considerados e tornam-se subsídios para o desenvolvimento dos modelos posteriores. Para coleta de dados são utilizados métodos de questionários, entrevistas e observação direta durante o transcorrer dos cursos. / Tese (Doutoramento) / IPEN/T / Instituto de Pesquisas Energeticas e Nucleares - IPEN/CNEN-SP

Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T12:28:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T13:57:24Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Dissertacao (Mestrado) / IPEN/D / Instituto de Pesquisas Energeticas e Nucleares - IPEN-CNEN/SP

Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T12:49:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T14:02:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Tese (Doutoramento) / IPEN/T / Instituto de Pesquisas Energeticas e Nucleares - IPEN/CNEN-SP

Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T12:28:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T13:57:24Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / A abordagem do tema mudanças climáticas por dois jornais diários e duas revistas semanais de informação em 2006 e 2007 e a percepção deste tema por formadores de opinião constituem o tema central deste trabalho. Uma pesquisa de campo foi realizada com assinantes dos jornais Folha de S. Paulo e O Estado de S. Paulo e das revistas Veja e Época, com jornalistas desses veículos e com cientistas da área de mudanças climáticas. Mostrou-se elevado o interesse do público pelos temas de ciência, em geral, e meio ambiente em particular. Nos periódicos analisados foram detectados conceitos incorretos do ponto de vista técnico e a cobertura voltou-se principalmente às pesquisas que mostravam impactos das mudanças climáticas. Segurança energética, outro fator fortemente relacionado à questão climática, orientou a pesquisa exploratória em busca de aferir a relação percebida pelo público entre mudanças climáticas e energia nuclear. Também pode ser traçado um paralelo entre o colapso ambiental e a catástrofe nuclear, presente no imaginário popular desde as explosões das bombas atômicas em Hiroshima e Nagasaki. Considerando o papel das ciências de modo geral, é imprescindível destacar que a melhor pesquisa não pode estar dissociada da comunicação eficiente e eficaz, capaz de mobilizar os cidadãos e sensibilizar tomadores de decisão. O diálogo entre cientistas e público, saberes tradicionalmente compartimentados, pode e deve ser praticado e a imprensa tem um papel fundamental neste processo. / Dissertacao (Mestrado) / IPEN/D / Instituto de Pesquisas Energeticas e Nucleares - IPEN-CNEN/SP

To teach effectively, teachers rely on feedback from their students. But students often dislike conventional forms of feedback such as taking tests or answering questions in front of their peers. For my MFA thesis project, I have designed tools that k-12 educators can use to elicit formative feedback, even from quiet and reserved students and those who do not feel their feedback is of value. My overarching intent with these lowstakes, low-tech, inexpensive tools is to improve teaching and learning. By giving teachers tools that generate useful feedback in a way that is low-stakes for the students, all students are given a voice. Through this design process, I also developed some generalizable principles about the way in which good formative feedback can be elicited in learning environments. / text

Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T12:26:27Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T14:04:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Na sociedade atual a utilização dos recursos tecnológicos e da internet mostram-se fundamentais em todas as áreas da sociedade e a educação não poderia ficar afastada de tal evolução. Dessa forma, o ensino à distância é ferramenta essencial no desenvolvimento educacional, mostrando-se elemento inovador e estimulante, não só por oferecer recursos variados e complementares à formação do educando mas, principalmente, diante das facilidades inerentes à sua utilização a distância, abrangendo localidades remotas e de difícil acesso, bem como possibilitando minimização de custos e, com isso, permitindo ampla difusão do conhecimento. Neste trabalho objetivou-se a apuração do interesse e da viabilidade da implantação do curso a distância da disciplina de Fundamentos de Física Nuclear na Pós-Graduação do IPEN, utilizando infra-estrutura de software livre, através da realização de um Projeto Piloto de ensino à distância. A pesquisa desenvolveu-se em três etapas, através de entrevistas com alunos e professores da Pós-Graduação do IPEN, a fim de avaliar o interesse dos entrevistados na utilização do ensino a distância. Os resultados da referida pesquisa servirão de subsídio para futura implantação do ensino à distância na Pós-Graduação do IPEN, tendo sido constatado o interesse e aceitabilidade por parte dos entrevistados na implantação do referido curso, bem como foram colhidos valiosos dados que servirão de embasamento para possibilitar a criação e implantação, com sucesso, do curso de Pós-Graduação à distância no IPEN. / Dissertacao (Mestrado) / IPEN/D / Instituto de Pesquisas Energeticas e Nucleares - IPEN-CNEN/SP

Children with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) have difficulties in learning social and communication skills. This leads to impairments in social interaction, including lack of understanding others’ intentions, emotions, and mental states, and impairments in communication both verbal and nonverbal. One of the most widely used interventions that addresses social and communication skills is the “social story”. A social story aims to support children with ASC in coping with their own behaviour. Practitioners use social stories to present specific scenarios and to help children understand how they should respond. However, the development of social stories is time consuming, and teachers comment that it is difficult to share them as a resource for others or to customise them to individual children, using their current tools. This thesis explores how a social story authoring tool can be designed, developed and evaluated. The final aim is to better support practitioners in writing, using and assessing social stories for children with ASC compared with their current approaches. A series of studies with practitioners and researchers was carried out to inform the design of a social story authoring tool and to evaluate it. A framework for social stories was built with the purpose of informing the design. Based on this framework, a prototype was iteratively designed and developed. The final prototype (ISISSImproving Social Interaction through Social Stories) was evaluated with practitioners with experience in social story interventions. The evaluation showed that ISISS is perceived by practitioners to be a considerable improvement over their current approaches. The methodology employed in this research combines Action Research, User-Centred Design and Participatory Design. Practitioners and researchers were empowered with different roles at different research stages in order to maximise their contributions to the development process.

Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagraming is commonly used in introductory Computer Science to teach basic object-oriented design, but there appears to be a lack of suitable software to support this task well. Many of the available programs focus on developing code and not on enhancing learning. Those that were designed for educational use sometimes have poor interfaces or are missing common and important features, such as multiple selection and undo/redo. There is a need for software that is tailored to an instructional environment and has all the useful and needed functionality for that specific task. This is the purpose of minimUML. It provides a minimum amount of UML, just what is commonly used in beginning programming classes, while providing a simple, usable interface. In particular, minimUML was designed to support abstract design while supplying features for exploratory learning and error avoidance. Some of the functionality supported includes multiple selection, undo/redo, flexible printing, cut and paste, and drag and drop. In addition, it allows for the annotation of diagrams, through text or freeform drawings, so students can receive feedback on their work. To test minimUML's ease of use, it was run through a small usability study. While a number of issues were raised, the tool generally received positive evaluations that lead us to believe that we have reached our goal. / Master of Science

2025 / This thesis explores domain-specific AI applications in assistive technology, education, and botany. First, CameraMouse, an AI-powered system, enables computer use for individuals with severe motor impairments by converting head movements into cursor control. User studies highlight its effectiveness in enhancing accessibility. Next, an open-source platform for developing AI-powered academic chatbots was developed. Lastly, the thesis addresses species recognition and analysis in herbarium research, using fine-grained image classification, zero-shot learning, and conversational models. Early experiments show promising results in identifying subtle species differences. These projects demonstrate AI’s impact on accessibility, education, and botany, and are unified by a common goal: designing intelligent, human-centered systems that empower users and make workflows more effective.

Cultural diversity in early education has been taking an important role in schools for decades, but teaching in multicultural classrooms remains a challenge.  This systematic review proposed to highlight how preschool teachers make use of cultural diversity to develop educational tools and explore which tools are operationalized to address multicultural education in preschool. A search for articles has been carried out in online databases, resulting in ten articles included as a base for analysis. Educational tools and cultural diversity described in these articles covered important aspects to address multicultural education for children. A systematic review of the studies showed that firstly, preschool teachers have faced difficulties in applying cultural diversity in their practice. Secondly, although the teachers consider the curriculum to be an important tool it was revealed to be contradictory when referring to cultural diversity. The analyses concluded that curriculum, documentation and listen children’s needs and their prior experiences have an evident influence in teachers’ everyday work in addressing cultural diversity in preschool. Implications for future research were discussed in relation to the management of preschool teacher to develop a pedagogical plan in culturally diverse context and to consider the view of children and also the parent in the context of cultural diversity in preschool.