Abstract-This paper introduces the use of a flexible and affordable educational robot specifically developed for the practical experimentation inherent to technological disciplines. The robot has been designed to be reconfigurable and extendible, serving as an experimental platform across several undergraduate courses. As most students have a mobile cell phone, this was used as the main control computer for the so-called CellBot, thus avoiding any need to deal with the details of microcontrollers or other embedded computing devices. Assessment results are also presented, based on a pre-and post-survey of student opinion administered to 204 science and engineering students from several universities. Among the conclusions are that 83% of the students prefer to use these low-cost robots as tools to improve their learning of the theory in several disciplines, and 71% of the students stated that they prefer to have their own robot to experiment with, instead of using a didactic kit loaned to them by the university.

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Abstract. This work reports application of data mining techniques in an

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This article presents a novel closed loop control architecture based on audio channels of several types of computing devices, such as mobile phones and tablet computers, but not restricted to them. The communication is based on an audio interface that relies on the exchange of audio tones, allowing sensors to be read and actuators to be controlled. As an application example, the presented technique is used to build a low cost mobile robot, but the system can also be used in a variety of mechatronics applications and sensor networks, where smartphones are the basic building blocks.

The Interactive Digital Television (iDTV) has facilitated and expanded the communication and interaction in activities of knowledge acquisitions, entertainment and recreation in Distance Learning field. This new way of teaching and learning has been called t-Learning. In this context, the Learning Objects (LOs) have an important role to assist in the electronic courses' development. Due the fast progress of e-Learning, some efforts to standardization have appeared in order to enable the reusability of educational contents and interoperability among systems, and one of these standards is the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM). Therefore, the main goal of this work is to present an extension of SCORM aiming to adapt it in order to improve the search and navigation of LOs with educational content for t-Learning. That will be done through an authoring tool named T-SCORM ADAPTER, which will be able to apply this extension in a fast and efficient way.