Developing a knowledge of design and construction technology and engineering is often overlooked in favour of 'digital' technology such as tablets and computers. By taking children outdoors into nature, removing tablets and computers as well as artificial and synthetic materials and replacing them with only what nature provides, children become…

Purpose: This study aims to identify critical online teaching effectiveness factors from instructors' perspectives and experiences during COVID-19. Design/methodology/approach: This study used a qualitative phenomenology approach. In addition, the research used a snowball sample to identify faculty in the engineering and engineering technology…

A barrier to using head mounted display (HMD) virtual reality (VR) in education is access to hardware for large classes. This paper compares students' learning when engaging with an HMD VR simulation as the operator and as the observer, to evaluate whether benefits of HMD VR can be achieved without requiring all students to operate the equipment.…

Lab orientation is a vital part of learning for new students entering the university, as it provides the students with all the necessary and important information about the lab. The current orientation is manual, tedious, suffers from logistical constraints, lacks engagement, and provides no way to assess that outcomes have been achieved. This is…

Engineering professionals are expected to conduct their work in an ethical manner. However, students may receive limited instruction on ethics and demonstrate resistance to learning about ethics in practice, contributing to graduates being ill-prepared to face ethical dilemmas in the workplace. This study investigated the nascent learning by…

The "Next Generation Science Standards" framework outlines scientific and engineering practices as a key element of student development. Educators are just beginning to discover effective and meaningful ways to teach science content to students with intellectual disability; however, the literature on teaching science practices is still…

A summative evaluation of the Foreign Credential Recognition Program (FCRP) funded by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC) was conducted during the spring, summer and fall of 2008. The main objective of the evaluation was to measure the relevance, impacts, and cost-effectiveness of the program. Given the timing of the evaluation…

This paper reports on the results of a 3-year study conducted at the Centre for Schooling and Learning Technologies (CSaLT) at Edith Cowan University in collaboration with the Curriculum Council of Western Australia which concerns the potential to use digital technologies to represent the output from assessment tasks in the senior secondary…

Learning support in mathematics and statistics has arisen and developed in response to student needs in many universities. After discussing background to such support, this article gives a brief overview of learning support in mathematics and statistics in Australian universities as found in an Australian Learning and Teaching Council project and…

This paper describes the use of robotics in an Early Years classroom as a tool to aid the development of technological skills in a creative environment rich with literacy and numeracy opportunities. The pilot project illustrates how a three-phase process can result in the development of: (1) emergent literacy and numeracy, (2) digital access for…

An evaluation of application of the conceptual mapping technique (Inglis, 2003) to the team-based design of fourteen courses in an Engineering undergraduate program is described. The evaluation employed a method of scoring each conceptual map against criteria tied to the objectives of the design process. The evaluation method was found to be…

This document presents the proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Mathematics Education Research Group of Australasia (MERGA). The theme of this conference is "Navigating Currents and Charting Directions." The theme reminds us that, although we are constantly pushed to account for the quality and impact of our research, we…