• Energy Research
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Secondary level education in Ireland is going through a major transition with the introduction of the new Junior Cycle programme. For the first time sustainability is being embedded into every subject and teachers have been given the opportunity, and flexibility to create their own curriculum. Addressing this, 8 teachers at Castletroy College worked collaboratively on the “E-Mining@School” project to incorporate sustainability into their subjects’ curriculum using an ambitious multidisciplinary approach. This approach attempted to connect sustainability to the student’s everyday lives through the product that teenagers covet the most; their smartphones.The project developed a collaborative cross- curriculum pilot that explored the common theme of ‘urban mining of e-waste for Critical Raw Materials (CRMs)’ and the teachers integrated this common theme into the curriculum of 5 subjects that included Science, Geography, Business, Technology, and Civic, Social and Political Education (CSPE) that would be delivered concurrently. The pilot ran for 4 weeks, beginning at the end of January 2019. A cohort of 220 2nd year students attended 60 lessons over all 5 subjects. 24 teachers delivered these lessons and each student received, on average, over 38 hours of lessons. The project culminated in a public WEEE collection event that recovered over 11 tonnes of WEEE that was sent for recycling. The second running took place in the Spring of 2020 and it is planned to continue it as an annual endeavour. The pilot demonstrated to students the value of the resources used in their electronic products and the challenges of finite resource scarcity. It showed them not only where their stuff came from but also where it goes when they thought it thrown it away. Through the project students became familiar with and champions of the Circular Economy which was very evident in the WEEE collection event. The project was also the first occasion for the teachers to collaborate on a cross-curricular approach to secondary education and the paper includes findings on this topic.

Abstract This paper presents part of the first year course given at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne, Department of Architecture, which deals with climatology and the physics of building. For many years, the initiation into architecture has been started by analysing vernacular architecture all over the world. The didactic object of these studies is to make the students aware of the complex reality of architecture in general. A series of models taken among the vernacular architecture of various countries is presented.

AbstractSustaining changes in teachers’ practices is a challenge that determines the success of curricular reforms, from which Digital Education (DE) is not exempt. As the literature on sustainability is considered “scarce” and “scattered”, long-term studies modelling the factors impacting teachers’ sustained uptake of DE pedagogical content are lacking. Thus, we investigate whether and how 287 in-service teachers sustained a primary school DE curricular reform over a year after they completed their two-year DE professional development program. We model the sustainability of the reform through Structural Equation Modelling, and identify critical sustainability-factors. The validated Sustainable Adoption of Digital Education (SADE) model confirms that sustainability in the fourth year of the reform depends on perceived usefulness of teaching the new content, ease of implementation, and access to sufficient support in schools. Such factors should thus be evaluated, accounted for in the implementation phase of the reform, and sustained over time. The findings confirm that the DE curricular reform model contributes to positive self-efficacy to teach DE, provides sufficient in-school support, and promotes increasing adoption over time. However, as teachers’ practices have not yet stabilised, and teachers may still adopt more to cover the breadth of DE-concepts, it is important to remain attentive to remaining sustainability barriers: lack of time, effort required to teach DE with teachers preferring to delegate, and lack of student-learning evidence, the latter being a significant challenge to address in the literature. These barriers must therefore be jointly addressed by researchers and practitioners in the field in order to promote the sustainability of the reform.

Despite a growing interest in player-centred methods for serious games, little is known on how to achieve this goal in practice when prospective users are children. Foundational questions remain unanswered, such as to which design dimensions children should contribute, and how and when they should be engaged. This paper presents the methods and results of two studies that inspired Skies of Manawak, a game for developmental dyslexia remediation. The first study engaged 60 children (age 8–13) in 15 ideation workshops to highlight the story and aesthetics of the game. The second study engaged 258 children (age 8–11) in the comparative evaluation of the game demo with a commercial cognitive training system. The results proved the importance and complexity of the early involvement of children in design. Children strongly appreciated the demo, particularly the story their peers contributed to shaping. However, this story deviated from their desires in several critical dimensions. It had to reconcile gender stereotypes and the violence embedded in their narratives with the game’s purpose. An apparent conflict between designers and children’s values emerged, supporting the idea that children’s engagement in serious game design requires effective mediation to avoid compromising the purposes they intend to achieve.

Abstract A search in energetic, high-multiplicity final states for evidence of physics beyond the standard model, such as black holes, string balls, and electroweak sphalerons, is presented. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb−1 collected with the CMS experiment at the LHC in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV in 2016. Standard model backgrounds, dominated by multijet production, are determined from control regions in data without any reliance on simulation. No evidence for excesses above the predicted background is observed. Model-independent 95% confidence level upper limits on the cross section of beyond the standard model signals in these final states are set and further interpreted in terms of limits on semiclassical black hole, string ball, and sphaleron production. In the context of models with large extra dimensions, semiclassical black holes with minimum masses as high as 10.1 TeV and string balls with masses as high as 9.5 TeV are excluded by this search. Results of the first dedicated search for electroweak sphalerons are presented. An upper limit of 0.021 is set at 95% confidence level on the fraction of all quark-quark interactions above the nominal threshold energy of 9 TeV resulting in the sphaleron transition.