• can be personalized according to the goals, knowledge and capabilities of the students
• has entertaining and competitive components
• provides feedback during learning and optimizes the individual learning trajectory and learning method ‘on the fly’.

As a first step, we have been organizing a competition on a course on acoustics, an interdisciplinary subject. For the list of topics, please, see the pages below and the references therein:

• Acoustics,
• Acoustics Science,
• Musical Acoustics,
• Architectural/Engineering acoustics,
• Physical Acoustics and also
• Mathematics: Discovering the Mathematics of Sound
• Acoustic News
  

Developers will be encouraged to team up and submit a course material for a courses on musical acoustics.

We believe that efficient STEM materials need to bridge different disciplines for proper ‘grounding’ of the main concepts to everyday experiences. In turn, we would like to encourage team formation.

Courses will be evaluated by an expert team. The team will be led by two members of the InfoHumanica Virtual Knowledge Center of two universities:

• Benő Csapó, Professor of Education. Benő is the head of the Graduate School of Educational Sciences at University of Szeged, Hungary, and he is also the vice chair of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA),
• András Lőrincz, Professor of Informatics. András is the leader of an interdisciplinary team of the Faculty of Informatics of the Eötvös Loránd University. The team is engaged in human-computer interaction, facial expression analysis, multi-player educational games, data mining, and artificial intelligence.

We ask you to submit your candidates for becoming members of the team.

Competitors should submit their work under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

There will be two winners, one on each track. Sponsors and the winning prize called ‘STEM Universe Award’ are sought-after and will be announced before the starting date of the competition.

The winning courses will undergo testing at schools in order to evaluate and improve them further and to progress towards our long-term goals. We will recruit teachers with students, who will give and take the courses, respectively. There are special conditions requiring informed consent during this testing phase. We are already developing technology elements that protect personal rights automatically in order to diminish problems with enrolling into our courses – we are planning to introduce them during year 2013.

During testing, we will monitor and record students’ faces as well as the teacher’s face (facial expression tracking through webcam) – recorded videos will be annotated by experts. The teacher will see students’ faces on her/his computer and will be able to communicate with the student through the local area system. We will also monitor and record teacher-student interactions. This will aid the development of the ‘Artificial Tutoring Buddy’ agent with the aim to learn from such examples and mimic the teacher in her/his absence. We plan to include this futuristic goal at the very first step.

As we believe in gamification, we will set up a competitive, multi-player, internet-based, risk-taking game for students. Players will also be monitored and recorded. We will ask questions, will give tasks and quizzes and are interested in the breadth of knowledge of the students. We are also inviting you to suggest tasks and quizzes for this part of the course.

Finally, we will publish a report about the course, including the experiences collected during the gaming phase. This report will aid the future evaluation of courses.

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