Abstract
Training in STEM centers is becoming increasingly relevant in order to meet the new educational needs caused mainly by the rapid speed with which new technologies have been entering our lives in recent years. Existing university e-learning systems can enhance the capacity of these centers by providing shared learning material. This paper presents a distributed educational platform that supports sharable usage of teaching material at university and in STEM centers in secondary schools. The architecture of the platform is also presented including two basic components. The university e-learning environment operates as a back-end and the front-end component is located in the STEM center. Furthermore, the implemented prototype of the platform is also discussed in the article. The use of the platform is demonstrated by two educational games. The platform is expanded with four educational robots to increase the attractiveness of the educational process.
Highlights
Educators are looking for more and more interesting and attractive forms of e-learning, especially in times like the ongoing crisis related to the COVID-19 pandemic
The repeated use of ready-made teaching material tested in a real educational process and the ability to adapt it to various groups of learners and avoid the need for redevelopment are essential requirements for modern e-learning systems
An important utility is the shared use of developed and well-functioning information resources—in this case, teaching material and e-learning tools. Such an integrated domain created by e-learning at university and e-learning in STEM centers in secondary schools is presented in this article
Summary
Educators are looking for more and more interesting and attractive forms of e-learning, especially in times like the ongoing crisis related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our team from the DeLC Laboratory at the University of Plovdiv has been developing the VES (Virtual Education Space) learning platform [1] as a cyber-physical and social space for years Taking into account these challenges, we decided to expand and modernize VES, which we use for real education of students at the university to support secondary school education and in particular for game-based education in STEM centers. An important utility is the shared use of developed and well-functioning information resources—in this case, teaching material and e-learning tools. Such an integrated domain created by e-learning at university and e-learning in STEM centers in secondary schools is presented in this article. The article ends with a conclusion and a future work section
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