The Ceibal Foundation and ANII announce the projects selected

The Ceibal Foundation and the National Research and Innovation Agency (ANII) present the 6 selected projects that will be funded as part of the seventh edition of the Education Sector Fund “Digital Inclusion: Education with New Horizons”.

The purpose of the 2021 call was to fund research projects providing original data regarding existing knowledge in the area of teaching and learning aided by digital technologies which may be linked to social or educational aspects of Plan Ceibal.

The call had two modalities with specific objectives:

• Modality A: Focusing on priority issues and with findings applicable to Plan Ceibal in coordination with ANEP.
• Modality B: Focusing on broad lines of interest of the Ceibal Foundation.

Modality A selected projects:

Global Network Medals, a gamified learning ecosystem for developing crosscutting skills in the classroom, University of the Republic, Interdisciplinary Space.

The project aims to analyze the potential of a medals scheme developed in Uruguay as an effective pedagogical tool for the development of crosscutting skills in primary school students. The purpose of the approach is to carry out an exploratory study on the teachers’ and students’ perceptions of their experience with the Global Network Medals tool implemented by Plan Ceibal. The medals are regarded as a gamified element which brings game logics into a curricular environment as a strong incentive to channel curriculum content while positioning crosscutting skills as indispensable abilities for the individual’s development in society.

The institutional management of a blended curriculum. Case studies in secondary education in Uruguay, Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences Uruguay in conjunction with the Universidad de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina.

This proposal seeks to systematically and empirically demonstrate the proposals that six secondary schools in Uruguay implemented in 2020 and 2021 in the context of the Covid-19 Pandemic. The findings of this research are intended to provide valuable feedback for school boards, teachers and public policymakers, since it is an ongoing debate that will have an impact on the future of education systems in general, particularly in Uruguay.

Megafauna 3D: open multimedia resources for science education and the conservation of natural heritage, University of the Republic, School of Sciences.

This proposal aims to expand the Megafauna project – an educational project that seeks to promote the dissemination of and access to the South American paleontological heritage through 3D models and replicas of fossils of Pleistocene mammals – to produce educational multiplatform and multimedia materials focusing on the teaching of natural sciences and natural heritage for use in primary and secondary schools.

Study and development of alternative interfaces between people and electronic devices, University of the Republic, School of Engineering.

At present, a large number of electronic devices, such as personal computers and mobile phones, are used in daily life to access information and entertainment, communicate, study and work. This project seeks to study and manufacture alternative interfaces that will make it possible to control these electronic devices.

Modality B selected projects:

Study and development of child-robot interaction in the classroom context in early childhood education: improvements in the design of Robotito to increase its integration and ownership, University of the Republic, Interdisciplinary Centre for Cognition in Teaching and Learning.

The aim of the project is to redesign the child-robot interaction proposed by RoboTito and adjust it to the cognitive, perceptual and motor skills of children as well as the needs of educators. In order to develop the new version of the robot, both end users (children and educators) will be involved from the beginning in the design process, which includes the assessment of the current robot (usability tests, ergonomic assessment, peer tutoring), improvement definition stages (interviews, brainstorming, drawings) and assessment of prototypes (field studies, video analyses, observation sheets, usability tests). This participatory, incremental process will help develop a robot suited to the context of early childhood education that may be brought into the classroom.

Using teacher- and student-centred artificial intelligence to analyze inclusive, resilient teaching and learning processes, University of the Republic, School of Engineering, in conjunction with the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Interdisciplinary Centre for New Technologies in Education, Brazil.

The COVID-19 emergency challenged the resilience of education systems in facing crisis scenarios, causing increased inequality in access to quality education for everyone, among other consequences. Artificial intelligence (AI), big-data and cloud-computing are technologies that provide educational institutions with very useful tools for enhancing their resilience. The project proposes research in combination with training activities, promoting the inclusion of the topic of AI in teacher training syllabi. The developments will be put into practice in case studies with pre- and post-2020 pandemic data to identify the processes and variables that contributed to educational resilience in Uruguay and Brazil.

The Fund is an initiative of the Ceibal Foundation and ANII that has been in operation since 2015. It is a tool aimed at research groups based in national or international, public or private institutions, which promotes the establishment of partnerships with institutions from other countries and enhances the impact of the projects. In this regard, it should be pointed out that two of the six projects selected in the 2021 call involve foreign institutions (from Brazil and Argentina) who proposed the projects together with a counterpart in Uruguay. The implementation of 52 national and international research projects in the field of education and technology have been funded and supported until 2021 inclusive.

Access more information here.