About Theodora Tziampazi

https://auth.academia.edu/TheodoraTziampazi https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodora-s-tziampazi-7010779a/

Our Green App: Coding and Artificial Intelligence for Sustainability

Posted on 11/05/2022 by Theodora Tziampazi

By Theodora S. Tziampazi

Welcome in our green app!

A virtual assistant will guide you through the buttons of the application and remind you some tips for an environmentally-aware lifestyle. Reuse, reduce, recycle… and let the demo videos speak for themselves.

Our green app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aedHiYDr7NQ&t=58s

Demo of the English version of the app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9HindPjHaM

Motivation sparks

The introductory part before the coding lessons was supported by some thought-provoking content I discovered in the “Terra Mission MOOC: Teaching Sustainability for Action”, a course supported by Scientix. It was the section on Circular Economy (English, Greek) that was most relevant to our work. Circular Economy is also the topic of the 4th Open Technologies in Education Competition organized by GFOSS – Open Technologies Alliance, Hellenic National Scientix Contact Point , while the mobile application is the submission of our school to this competition. I spent many hours with …apps and downs 😉 exploring App Inventor’s cappabilities until I came app with an idea that could meet my teaching expectations and goals and help students gain and app-ly knowledge. The only side effect was an app-etite for puns.

**Level App in Digital Literacy**

This mobile app was developed in MIT App Inventor 2 programming environment https://appinventor.mit.edu/. The virtual assistant hopefully makes the app more interactive and chats with us thanks to a capple of Artificial Intelligence Components included in App Inventor 2: the Speech Recognizer and the TexToSpeech. Since App Development is a multidimensional task that requires UX/UI (i.e. User eXperience/User Interface) considerations, a few more digital tools and resources were used. These materials are open and free, but there is attribution in the “About” screen of the app.

Think global, act local!

The pilot courses I designed were first implemented in Primary School of Fourni Korseon, Samos, Greece in 2022. As you have seen in demos, the result is adap(p)ted to our local context and it reflects our effort to make a “green” contribution to our remote island. The slogan behind this work is “think globally, act locally!”. I assumed that a particular context could be more meaningful in the sense that it is likely to engage members who identify as members of a school or a local community. But, it is not exclusive to those members; there is an English version of our app for the island (and this blog!) visitors.

**Coming …app next! Customize the context**

After the pilot courses, which took place in the spring of 2022, I have re-arranged and improved the lessons in order to create a constructive learning scenario for App Inventors- even beginners. The code is open source and will be published soon along with the learning scenario in Greek and English. I am currently refining the tutorial… so that more green apps pop app!

I will show you how to make such an application yourself and how to tailor it to your hometown, place etc. if so desired. In other words: After the pilot…we take off to any context!

I will keep you appdated on the course. Stay tuned!

Until then, smile, learn and protect our planet! 🙂

STEM wishes,

Theodora S. Tziampazi

Primary School Teacher, Scientix Ambassador (Greece)

STEM bites: A clip and a trip

Posted on 30/04/2020 by Theodora Tziampazi

Author: Theodora S. Tziampazi

Hello everyone! I am a primary school teacher and this is the second year I participate in the STEM Discovery Campaign, after becoming a huge fan of block-based programming in 2019!

The time management of this school year allowed for the implementation of a few activities aiming at expanding my students’ previous experience in Scratch and reveal the magic of making and sharing authentic material. My 6th graders had already been engaged in some Scratch projects last year in ICT lessons and I decided to build upon their knowledge and to organize some workshops in the context of thematic days, campaigns, contests and a trip.

This post is about a couple of activities which took place in February – March, 2020.

A clip: The first project was an animation designed to be integrated into a video clip. The context was a song competition held by European School Radio. After our song was recorded and edited under the coordination of our music teacher, it was time to proceed to a visualization. Our video clip had a part (1:40-1:59) made using Scratch.

Continue reading →

Game Design

Posted on 13/05/2019 by Theodora Tziampazi

by Theodora S. Tziampazi

STEAMulation Theory: The virtually awakening moment when you realize that you have been playing in a stimulating STEAM educational game for the last months.

Play in teacher-student mode

Start

You are in the map of STEM Discovery Week 2019 and spot an activity, titled Game Desing in Scratch, which took place in a small school of a small village of a small country of a small planet. Continue reading to watch me gamify my reflection.

Level 1

All you need is love for teaching and money for materials to introduce your students to an amazing world of robots. Unless you live in a parallel universe where your small public school thanks a generous educational policy, search for available programmes and apply for a grant from organisations which may support you. My version of the game has John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation in ‘thanks’ part. This is the way we collected educational robotics kits and books.

Badge Spotting opportunities