It is difficult to measure something we cannot clearly define. No wonder that, for the over 100 definitions of the creativity proposed in the literature, there are almost as many scales and assessment tools. Most of these instruments have been designed for research purposes, and are difficult to apply and score, especially in the educational environment. Not to mention that they are expensive. The research described in this paper is aimed to develop a free, fast, and easy to use software tool for the assessment of creativity in the educational context. To this purpose, we have designed a new scale with 20 items, based on a novel approach focusing on detecting the factors known to block the creativity, like stereotypical thinking, and social conformity. The user input is collected through a web based interface, and the actual interpretation of the results is automated by means of a fuzzy logic algorithm. The proposed solution is interesting because it can be easily integrated in almost any e-learning platform, or used as a stand-alone tool for tracing the evolution of the students involved in courses for the development of creative thinking skills, and also for possible other applications.
This paper describes a simple solution to create self-organization of the educational content in learning networks by enabling stigmergic interactions between learners. For this purpose, the learning objects have been associated with a special type of metadata, based on the concept of "virtual pheromones". By accessing the learning objects, users create trails of virtual pheromones, which are interpreted as an implicit recommendation for other learners to use those objects. The resulting system operates as a simple recommender system based on collaborative filtering in ad-hoc learning networks. We also suggest the possibility to implement such system in a P2P file sharing environment, as a solution to improve the sustainability of open education systems.
Although very few robots actually go to Mars, we continue to design these machines as if they were organisms operating in a totally unknown and hostile environment. In fact, in most situations, the environment is not only predictable, but it can also be manipulated so that the missions of the autonomous robot may be supported, by including sensors, actuators, computing and communication equipment. One of the most convenient ways to manipulate the environment is to deploy a number of RFID devices, capable of storing a variety of digital data, aimed to provide autonomous robots with valuable navigation information. As a result, the on-board equipment can be significantly reduced, along with the power requirements, and the overall cost of the robots. While the vast majority of the applications of the RFID technology for robot control are related to robot localization and mapping, this paper presents an experiment aimed to demonstrate the possibility of using RFID tags for path following.
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