Massive-scale educational intervention: Mate Marote goes to La Rioja

MATÍAS LÓPEZ Y ROSENFELD; ANDREA PAULA GOLDIN; MARIANO SIGMAN; DIEGO FERNÁNDEZ SLEZAK

Huerta Grande, Córdoba

Congreso; XXVII Congreso Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencia; 2012

Argentina is living a unique oportunity where a great amount of primary and secondary school students have their own laptop, given by institutional programs such as Joaquín V. González (Primary school at La Rioja). The fact that all learning and teaching tasks are represented in the same digital environment is a formidable tool for educational applications, as well as for research and experimentation. From the perspective of information technology, the challenge is how to interface with this vast corpus of cognitive development data to convert conceptual questions relevant to educational practice into quantifiable, analytic queries. We designed a flexible framework consisting of educational games and activities, designed for automatic maintenance, keeping up-to-date information of this application and registering anonymous usage behavior for further analysis. The first pilot intervention was deployed in La Rioja, with more than 150 computers installed. This deployment consisted of three games to train cognitive capabilities: mainly planning, working memory and inhibitory control. Interestingly, even though this intervention is unsupervised, preliminary statistic analysis shows that children gaming behavior is consistent with previous supervised-interventions results. This effort suggests a novel window for studying (and intervene in) human cognition development, with a great amount of new possibilities, pushing a profound reformulation of teaching and learning.