The Cottage that Kids Built: Jack's Mill School and the significance of architecture for progressive education in New Zealand in the late 1930s

Even today, the tiny West Coast community of Kōtuku is difficult to find. In 1935, when Edward Darracott arrived to the position of sole teacher at Jack's Mill School, it must have felt very far removed indeed from the rest of New Zealand. Yet here, in what might be described as a Department of Education backwater, Darracott implemented an audaciously progressive educational experiment. Central to his teaching, Darracott embarked on two major projects with his students. The first (and in keeping with an interschool competition at that time) was the design and establishment of a garden. The second project would prove more ambitions. With responsibility for the planning and building passed to the students, Darracott initiated the construction on the school grounds of a three-quarter scale bungalow, complete with furnishings, running water and electricity. The "miniature bungalow" received national attention at the time, and survives today under the care of the Department of Conservation, but outside the interests of back-road tourists, Darracott's educational experiment remains largely neglected. This paper will provide an overview of Darracott's achievements in Kōtuku before focusing attention of the specific architectural interests he activated. This begins with the self-conscious civility on display in the garden, before moving on to the opportunities and consequences of domesticity at work with the cottage itself. Viewed in this way, it is hoped that the isolation of Darracott's achievement (geographically and educationally) will begin to be replaced by a well-informed alignment with international practices of the time. Moreover, it will be shown how these "radical pedagogies" saw architecture as a necessary - perhaps inevitable - tool of implementation.

Conclusion

The conclusion succinctly summarizes the primary aims of the book as a whole, before considering how ‘effective’ the education provided by the Napolas was in comparison with the Third Reich’s other educational institutions. The NPEA appear to have been in the vanguard of many educational developments which the Reich Education Ministry subsequently intended to apply more broadly throughout the German school system. They also formed a prototype for the non-elite system of state boarding schools founded by August Heißmeyer at Hitler’s behest in 1941—the Deutsche Heimschulen. The programme of the Adolf-Hitler-Schools, rival elite schools founded in 1937 by Reich Organization Leader Robert Ley and Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach, was also to a great extent deliberately copied from that of the Napolas; however, these Party elite schools were never able to realize their full potential and compete with the NPEA on equal terms. The Napolas were also more effective in their provision of a National Socialist ‘total education’ than ‘civilian’ schools and the Hitler Youth, as well as institutions such as the Reich Labour Service (RAD), the ‘Year on the Land’ (Landjahr), or the Order Castles (Ordensburgen). Taken on their own terms, then, the National Political Education Institutes can ultimately be seen as the Nazi dictatorship’s most effective educational experiment.

Underlying variables in the understanding of movement in engineering students

This article describes the understanding of motion by active students taking Newtonian physics for engineering, supported by active learning, during the pandemic due to COVID-19; in addition, an unsupervised predictive model of learning achievement was constructed from variables identified using the principal component analysis technique on the responses. the instrument used is the modified test of understanding graphs-kinematics comprehension. students from two universities in Bogotá, Colombia participated. The results show a lower level of accuracy in students in remote face-to-face mode, compared to the reference group of physical presence; by way of reflection, the forced educational experiment implies resizing the teaching activity in the teaching and learning of movement.

Developing Physics Experiments Using Augmented Reality Game-Based Learning Approach: A Pilot Study in Primary School

The augmented reality game-based learning (ARGBL) approach is an advantageous pathway for the development and enhancement of teaching and learning processes. To this end, this paper presents the design and development of an ARGBL application for the implementation of physics experiments in the fifth grade of a Greek primary school. The purpose of the ARGBL system is twofold: to educate and entertain. For this reason, a treasure hunt game was implemented, which allows students to interact with a digital world and to manipulate virtual objects with the use of an augmented reality (AR) device. Then, according to the instructions, students have to collect all the materials to conduct the AR educational experiment. Overall, the evaluation of the system’s usability by 17 users (both students and teachers) was very promising, indicating that the ARGBL application has the potential to be an easy-to-use educational tool for improving not only the teaching of physics experiments in primary school but also the learning process, by positively affecting the students’ motivation and engagement.

Moodle System One of the Way to Monitoring Competence of Future Teachers of Music Art

The article are given the scientific and methodological conditions for the production and progress of distance learning courses for future teachers of music through the competencebased, system, action approaches. The author identifies the components that are formed on the basis of the content of the course are and portion of the structure of the competence hierarchy of future music teacher. Materials of research are founded on the experience of education in the course of distance learning of Basic Musical Instrument (piano). The study considers the principal components of development and design of a distance learning course, including theoretical, practical, individual work, and control. The author grounds the specifics methods of distance learning for future teachers of music, in specific their instrumental training and the effectiveness of this training, differentiating the following main methods: of collecting information and using technologies of communication , such us multimedia and method of project . The criteria for control of information and skills were developed. The research was portion of educational experiment involving 52 bachelor students, Music Specialization. According to the results of the study, the study of the subject Basic Musical Instrument (Piano) using the Moodle learning environment contains a number of advantages, which are primarily manifested in higher assessment results of students’ learning. The motivational, musical instrumental and cognitive abilities of these students were approximately 10% higher than students who studied according to traditional methods. The opinion characterize the results of implementation and effectiveness of experimental study on the use of distance learning courses for the progressof instrumental performance competence of future teachers of music. The influence of different methods of distance learning on learner performance is also determined

Estrategias basadas en análisis de redes sociales para optimizar el clima de aprendizaje en la universidad

The aim of this study was to detect leaders among a group of university students based on their centrality scores and, from these scores, to distribute roles to help enhance learning climate. We understood that learning climate improved when the construction of networked knowledge was stimulated from the perspective of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. We conducted the educational experiment in a virtual environment. An online discussion forum was set up in a loo- sely structured format, and the students’ centrality scores were calculated from the social network they generated in the forum. Our findings show that student connectivity increased significantly and that several leadership styles were detected. Based on these leadership styles we designed strategies for optimizing learning climate in a self-regulated and stable way. Based on the type of centrality, we detected leaders in terms of their popularity, sociability, closeness to others, control of information flowing through the network, and influence. The novelty of this study resides in the incipient production of educational technology based on Social Network Analysis and, specifically, on the design of centrality-based strategies for optimizing climate in the university classroom.

W poszukiwaniu rozumowania matematycznego najmłodszych uczniów – doniesienie z badań wdrożeniowych

Mathematical reasoning is a crucial competence for the construction of useful knowledge. The text presents selected results of the study of students of the third grade of an elementary school in the field of text task solving. The conducted educational experiment showed the potential of solving non-standard tasks for developing the reasoning of mathematically weaker students. Contact with tasks that require independent mathematizing allowed to reduce the number of students with the lowest results in the post test. The ways of understanding the role of drawing in exploring mathematical relations described in the task were analysed.