Pixel International Conferences

With the advance of technology and the wealth of information continuously generated nowadays, the Open Data concept has become essential to our societies, and so has the need to educate our students on how to demand, search for, and exploit information which should be open to citizens and entrepreneurship. A similar attitude that young generations need to be educated on regards the Free/Open Source Software. FOSS solutions can be as efficient as proprietary software, at minimal costs, with the extra added value of the ability to contribute to the community by enhancing or modifying open code. Last but not least, quality of life, livability and sustainability of our neighbourhoods, cities and countries and what we --citizens, scientists, decision-makers—ought to care and do about it, is also an important axis of K12 education.

The paradigm of a GIS application which can combine all the above ideas in a problem-solving setup was extensively used “in action”, for the very first time at this level, during a term-long project in an upper general K12 class in Greece, as part of an ongoing Erasmus+ Programme. More specifically, the student team carried out a social field research employing Likert-type questionnaires, which regarded livability, quality of life and sustainability in their city districts. QGIS, an open source GIS, was used in processing and illustrating the research geospatial attributes and their relationships, together with various FOSS and online services, regarding questionnaire document setup, online forms, and responses processing. Groups and Blogs, a service by the Greek School Network -official Intranet Service Provider for K12 Greek Schools, was exploited to facilitate remote cooperative work and results publishing.

Experiential Learning, learning by doing, inquiry-based learning methods were all exploited in a framework of social constructivism learning principles and a problem solving setup, all encapsulated in a long-term project methodology. Empirical results have been very encouraging, with students showing enthusiasm, creativity, and high levels of responsibility, together with high quality of the outcome product.