The Ceibal Foundation and ANII announce the projects selected by the 2023 Education Sector Fund

The Ceibal Foundation and the National Research and Innovation Agency (ANII) present the 4 selected projects that will be funded as part of the ninth edition of the Education Sector Fund “Digital Inclusion: Education with New Horizons”.

The purpose is to fund research projects that will provide original data on existing knowledge in the field of teaching and learning enabled by digital technologies that may be related to social or educational aspects.

The call involves two modalities:

Modality A: Aimed at priority issues with findings applicable to Ceibal in coordination with the National Administration of Public Education (ANEP).
• Blended education
• Competence-based curriculum
• Promoting accessibility in education
• STEAM teaching and learning
• Using data to monitor educational trajectories
• Academic performance and assistance
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education

Modality B: Aimed at Ceibal Foundation’s broad lines of interest.
• Digital society skills
• Digital inclusion
• Innovation in teaching and learning
• Feedback and assessment

Projects selected in Modality A:
Dr. Simon says: an environment for learning physics by integrating computational thinking, sensors and games, School of Sciences, University of the Republic.
This research aims to develop a physical-computational videogame environment associated with a set of activities and resources, programmable boards, sensors and robotics kits for the purpose of teaching kinematics and contributing to the development of scientific and computational thinking tools. The resulting device will be accessible from a browser and will make it possible to save each student’s progress and share it with their teacher. The assessment of learning acquired by the students is charted by contrasting it with that acquired in traditional lessons.

STEAM Literacy and its inclusion in the secondary education classroom, National Administration of Public Education – Teacher Training Council.
The purpose of this research is to design and implement contextualized and socially meaningful teaching sequences in STEAM pedagogies with resources for application in the classroom. The aim is to offer training for the design of teaching sequences to be undertaken by teacher training students in the blended modality doing their teaching practice in secondary education in coordination with their methodology teachers and teaching practice supervisors. This work also involves a nationwide and regionwide survey into the state of teaching and learning with the STEAM approach.

Projects selected in Modality B:
The co-design of teaching and learning strategies with the inclusion of digital technologies in STEM, National Administration of Public Education – Teacher Training Council.
This project focuses on research into and application of strategies for teaching and learning in blended teacher training STEM courses, integrating digital technologies. Co-design – focusing on collaboration among researchers, educators, and students – is presented as a means of modifying educational practices and meeting challenges in STEM learning. The proposal addresses techno-scientific practices and highlights the integration of digital technologies for diversifying teaching methods, furthering imagery, and promoting active, student-centred learning.

Automatic correction of texts in English written by students of the Uruguayan education system, School of Engineering, University of the Republic.
The objective of this project is to develop an automatic correction tool for texts produced by secondary school students of English with a focus on spelling and syntax in order to relieve the teacher of this work and allow them to focus on other text-related aspects. For this purpose, an English text corpus with material produced by students and a corresponding correction rubric will be compiled and annotated. Artificial intelligence models will be created that will detect mistakes, propose corrections and produce feedback for new texts.

Access more information here.