We had a further testing session in the Bodelschwinghschule in Münster, Germany, on March 25th and 26th.
We visited a new class, fourthgraders again, where we had a first spatial learning test with the 24 students. We devided the children in four groups, tested geocaching with the XO-Laptop, with a common GPS device displaying distance and direction and with a paper map. The fourth group just had some other assignments in class. As pre and post test the children had to draw a sketchmap of the school ground with all features they could remember. We tracked the children’s wayfinding, to compare the results in a spatial and temporal extent.
Besides that we continued Usability-Testing with the same class as in the January tests. After having examined the Geocaching activity the last time, we concentrated this time on the freshly developed Geotagging activity. See Screenstories in the TechBlog. The children had to tag different features on the school ground. In the assignment they could choose out 5 out of 9 features, like „tree“, „building“, „infrastructure“… They created maps with symbols for the choosen features.
The task was well understood and the children solved the assignment very quickly, having much fun. We realised little problems in the symbology again. We had a quite small error in the GPS data. The tags appeared between 2 and 7m away from their real position.
During both days, we installed the GI@School MultiTouch-surface and a Google Earth Interface in the classrooms, to keep the non tested children happy 😉 They loved the new technology in class and were exited about the new way of exploring maps.
After the easter holidays we will evaluate the test results in detail. With this successful session behind us we now are exited and looking forward to the tests in Rwanda in May.