Artificial intelligence (AI) in programming teaching is something that still has to be explored, since in this area assessment tools that allow grading the students work are the most common ones, but there are not many tools aimed toward providing feedback to the students in the process of creating their program. In this work a small sized AI-based intelligent tutor that answers students programming questions and provides them with examples is presented. AI is becoming more and more popular as time passes, allowing to perform tasks automatically in a way that could not be done before. From predictions to customization, AI is being used in many areas, not being educational environments outside this situation. AI is being used in educational settings to customize contents or to provide personalized feedback to the students, among others. In this scenario, The tool has been tested by university students at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos during the course Programming Fundamentals in the first course of their Biomedical Engineering degree to evaluate if it helps the students in the process of learning programming skills. One of the main goals was to provide guidance to the students without needing the instructor to be physically by their side. Even if the tool is still in its preliminary phase, it helped the students with their questions, providing accurate answers and examples. The students were able to use the intelligent tutor easily and they thought that it could be a useful tool to use in other courses.

This special issue highlights state-of-the-art research in intelligent systems and technology for people with diverse abilities. To control scope, we pay particular attention to cognitive diversity, including but not limited to, neurodevelopmental disorders and autism, cognitive and learningdisabilities, and dementia. We introduce the papers in this special issue by contextualizing them according to different research areas. By curating leading-edge contributions in this area, we aim to raise awareness about research challenges and requirements inherent in the development and assessment of systems designed for these categories of users.

Traditional data sources provide insufficient knowledge for measuring the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Data related to SDGs are sourced primarily from global databases maintained by international organizations, national statistical offices and other government agencies. Recent studies show the value of using data from Citizen Science (CS) for assessing the SDGs. There is an important online presence of CS programs, professional networks for CS and online communities of citizen scientists, leading to the generation of several CS platforms. In this context, the role of computational data science is key. This paper explores and exemplifies opportunities for combining web-data mining techniques and automatic classifiers to enhance the understanding of the inter-relation between CS and the SDGs. An analysis of different automatic classifiers is presented by comparing the results obtained from their application in a sample of 208 CS project descriptions. The results of this study indicate the benefits and limitations of these techniques (nCoder, ESA, OSDG and BERT), but also provides a discussion of the potential benefits of using data from CS projects to map the 17 SDGs.

This paper presents the Unibotics platform, a simulation framework for teaching robotics in university courses. It allows students to program robots from the web browser in Python, using novel and current technologies such as ROS middleware and Gazebo robotics simulator. Unibotics provides an interface that hides the initial complexity of installing and dealing directly with ROS, Gazebo or MoveIt and allows students to focus on the algorithmic aspects of robotics. In addition, this article describes two teaching experiences of using Unibotics with real higher education students to introduce robot control. First, with Computer Science students in an elective Robotics course at U. Complutense Madrid. Second, with students of "Automation and Industrial Robotics" course of Industrial Electronics and Automation Engineering degree at U. Rey Juan Carlos. Both experiences have been successful and they will be continued in the next course.

Robotics provides an increasing number of solutions for real-life problems, from autonomous driving to automatic cleaning, inspection and logistics. The demand of robotics education to train future engineers is also growing, both in regular degrees at universities and also in massive open online courses (MOOCs). Beyond theory lectures, robotics education typically requires hands-on and practiced robot programming to be effective and let the student develop the desired skills. This paper presents Unibotics, an open online learning platform that allows editing and running robot programs from the browser, and provides more than 20 academic units on service robotics, autonomous driving, drones, and mobile robotics. It uses state-of-the art open source robot simulator (Gazebo) and robot middleware (ROS), and so it is extensible with new exercises. It is intended as a tool for practical learning in robotics engineering university courses. The platform has been used by 130 students from four different university degrees. Furthermore, it has been experimentally validated at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC) Master Degree in Computer Vision with 22 students.

BackgroundCitizen science is a growing practice in which volunteers, including non-scientists, conduct or contribute to research by collecting and analyzing data. The increasing importance of citizen science in the last years has led to an increased interest in detecting how citizen science can contribute to scientific advancements in different areas. Recent research shows that citizen science has become a means of engagement between scientist and the public, encouraging scientific curiosity and promoting scientific knowledge. MethodsIn this article, we report on how to apply computational analysis techniques to Twitter messages to reveal the impact of citizen science in health-related areas. The main objectives are (1) to characterize central topics of these discussions, and (2) to identify particularly important actors in these social media networks. ResultsFor the topics, our findings suggest that sustainable development goals, technologies and health, and COVID-19 are those most addressed by the users. Other topics represented in the data are cancer, public health, mental health, and health and well being of sea and earth living creatures related to sustainable development goals. ConclusionBased on our results, those entities or actors who are most cited and retweeted are Twitter accounts of projects and not primarily individual professionals or citizen scientists.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming more and more popular as time passes, allowing to perform tasks that were difficult to do in the past. From predictions to customization, AI is being used in many areas, not being educational environments outside this situation. AI is being used in educational settings to customize contents or to provide personalized feedback to the students, among others. In this scenario, AI in programming teaching is something that still has to be explored, since in this area we usually find assessment tools that allow grading the students work, but we can not find many tools aimed towards providing feedback to the students in the process of creating their program. In this work we present an AI based intelligent tutor that answers students programming questions. The tool has been tested by university students at the URJC along a whole course. Even if the tool is still in its preliminary phase, it helped the students with their questions, providing accurate answers and examples. The students were able to use the intelligent tutor easily and they thought that it could be a useful tool to use in other courses.

This paper presents a gamification extension for the Unibotics educational robotics web platform, which provides the ability to organize online international competitions about robot programming. Unibotics includes several robotics challenges, the robots may be programmed in Python from the browser. It is ROS-based, cross-platform and uses Gazebo robotics simulator. The competition process has been fully automated creating an auxiliary user, named CeremonyMaster, which may load and run the submitted code from all the participants, and evaluate them providing a score depending on their performances when solving the challenge. At the same time the live results can be seen at a dynamic web page and the whole unfolding of the tournament is broadcasted through Twitch. The underlying goal of this extension is to increase the motivation and learning engagement of university students in computer science or robotics engineering areas. The extension has been experimentally validated with a first competition and more than 50 university students. The proposed challenge was to program a Formula 1 car, endowed with a camera, to follow a red line along a race circuit, the faster the better.

Citizen science (CS) involves volunteers who participate in scientific research by collecting data or by addressing the needs of the project they are involved in. In the last years, there has been an increasing interest in how CS can contribute to the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), that aim to reach a sustainable future. Research about data quality has taught us that through using an appropriate methodology, CS can foster scientific knowledge and promote specific actions to achieve accomplish goals. However, there is not much information about the SDGs that CS is more interested in. This paper presents a long-term study on how CS discuss about SDGs in Twitter, aiming to classify the discussion around the SDGs. The paper reports on a variety of topics such as open science, innovation and biodiversity, among others, but the results show that the most addressed topic in CS discussions in Twitter is about climate change, with corresponds to the SDG 13. Based on these findings, it is possible to affirm that climate change is a hot topic in CS in Twitter. However, there are also other SDGs that although underrepresented, are also discussed in CS.

This paper presents the new release of the Robotics Academy learning framework and the open course on Intelligent Robotics available on it . The framework hosts a collection of practical exercises of robot programming for engineering students and teachers at universities. It has evolved from an open tool, which the users had to install on their machines, to an open web platform, simplifying the user’s experience. It has been redesigned with the adoption of state-of-the-art web technologies and DevOps that make it cross-platform and scalable. The web browser is the new frontend for the users, both for source code editing and for the monitoring GUI of the exercise execution. All the software dependences are already preinstalled in a container, including the Gazebo simulator. The proposed web platform provides a free and nice way for teaching Robotics following the learn-by-doing approach. It is also a useful complement for remote educational robotics.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide different opportunities to students with intellectual disabilities and to professionals who work with them. However, few studies address the use of collaborative learning platforms and handheld devices to enhance the integration of people with intellectual disabilities in the labour market. We present a learning experience where active methodologies, such as collaborative work, are combined with the use of iPads and a learning management system following a video self-modelling methodology. The goal of this study was to determine whether the combination of traditional methodologies and new could be appropriate for students with intellectual disabilities and how they behave when having to rate their partner's work. The results show that the combination of active learning methodologies, video self-modelling and the use of learning platforms and tablets is promising for teaching job related skills to students with intellectual disabilities, as participants experienced increased motivation to complete the tasks, improving their skills in the process.

Citizen science involves volunteers who participate in scientific research by collecting data or by addressing the needs of the project they are involved in. Citizen science creates a nexus between science and education that, when coupled with emerging technologies, expands the frontiers of research. Social networks, such as Twitter, are increasingly being investigated to capture online interactive participation, to be said, the degree of engagement of citizen science researchers with their projects. Although citizen science projects have been remarkably successful in advancing scientific knowledge, there is not really any evidence supporting that social networks act as learning tools and it is not even known whether the educational aspect is taken into account in citizen science projects. In this paper, we present a preliminary Twitter study where we analyse the conversation around education in the citizen science area. Although the results show that there is some talk around educational aspects, Twitter is not mainly used to support educational activities overall.

This article presents a full course for autonomous aerial robotics inside the RoboticsAcademy framework. This “drone programming” course is open-access and ready-to-use for any teacher/student to teach/learn drone programming with it for free. The students may program diverse drones on their computers without a physical presence in this course. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) applications are essentially practical, as their intelligence resides in the software part. Therefore, the proposed course emphasizes drone programming through practical learning. It comprises a collection of exercises resembling drone applications in real life, such as following a road, visual landing, and people search and rescue, including their corresponding background theory. The course has been successfully taught for five years to students from several university engineering degrees. Some exercises from the course have also been validated in three aerial robotics competitions, including an international one. RoboticsAcademy is also briefly presented in the paper. It is an open framework for distance robotics learning in engineering degrees. It has been designed as a practical complement to the typical online videos of massive open online courses (MOOCs). Its educational contents are built upon robot operating system (ROS) middleware (de facto standard in robot programming), the powerful 3D Gazebo simulator, and the widely used Python programming language. Additionally, RoboticsAcademy is a suitable tool for gamified learning and online robotics competitions, as it includes several competitive exercises and automatic assessment tools.

Using information and communication technology (ICT) in childhood education is becoming more relevant as research shows that it can be used to foster children's academic and non-academic skills. ICT can help build environments where children can communicate and collaborate, but creating effective learning environments is not trivial. It is thus necessary to study which configuration is the most appropriate for encouraging collaboration. In this work, we present how two different ways of interacting with a multitouch tabletop, taking turns without having to agree on the answer and working simultaneously but having to agree on the answer, affect group communication and children's satisfaction. We have carried out four different learning experiments involving 180 children between 6 and 11 years of age who had to solve math problems in groups of three and four at a multitouch tabletop. Our results suggest that turn-based interaction makes students communicate more with each other when solving activities in groups. In addition, children's satisfaction is high when they perform activities at a multitouch tabletop, but learning outcomes seems to not be impacted by the way of interacting with the device. Thus, while multitouch tabletops can be used to create collaborative learning environments, it is the way in which students interact with the device that may impact group communication.

The adoption of information and communication technologies in primary education is crucial for adapting traditional classrooms to the digital era. Over time, young children are increasingly using touch screen technologies such as tablets at home and interactive whiteboards at school, either for leisure or for academic activities. However, the literature shows that there is still a gap between what is known about the benefits of using this technology and its real use in primary education settings. Most researchers have focused on the pedagogical theory behind using touch screen devices, but there are few empirical studies about how these technologies and different approaches affect students' learning processes. This paper presents two learning experiences in a primary school in Fuenlabrada (Madrid-Spain) where primary students performed mathematics activities using a multi-touch table with two different methodologies: turns and consensus. The results show that both methodologies help students acquire meaningful learning, but there is no statistically significance between them.

Research shows that teaching computer programming to children help them develop important 21st century skills such as planning, problem solving, and flexibility of thinking. However, teaching these skills to young children is not an easy task as the existing tools in the market do not seem to be well adapted for them. The aim of this work is to present BlueThinking, an inclusive application to learn programming at early stages. A preliminary evaluation with 5 and 6 years old children was carried out to get the first impressions of the application and detect possible issues. The results show that the degree of children satisfaction with the application was high. Therefore, we believe BlueThinking could be easily used with young children to help them developing the aforementioned skills as well as to introduce them in a subtle way to the world of computer programming.

The adoption of Information and Communication Technologies in early childhood education is crucial for adapting traditional classrooms to the digital era. Over time, young children are increasingly using touch screen technologies such as tablets at home and in early childhood settings. However, the literature shows that there is a significant gap in knowledge of using this technology in early childhood education. Most researchers have focused on the pedagogical theory behind using touch screen devices, but there have not been many empirical studies about how these technologies affect students' learning processes. This paper presents three learning experiences where early childhood students perform educational activities using tablet computers, interactive whiteboards, and paper cards. The results show that students who used the technology were more motivated and achieved better results that those who used paper cards.

Information and Communication Technologies offer new possibilities for teachers to enhance their teaching methods. The increasing use of personal computers, tablets, interactive whiteboards, or even multitouch tabletops in the classrooms seems to attract the interest of the students. However, there are not many tools that allow teachers to create multimedia activities for all these technologies in an effortless way. Most of current authoring tools either focus on creating content for only one device or they do not fully exploit the benefits of rich content for designing engaging educational activities. In this paper, we present an authoring toolkit composed by two applications: DEDOS-Editor, which allow teachers to design their own learning activities, and DEDOS-Web, which allows the students to perform those activities adapting them to multiple devices. To test both tools, we have performed two evaluations. One with teachers to test the authoring tools and a second one with primary school students to test if the activities designed with this tool enhance their learning process. Results show that DEDOS-Editor is an easy to learn authoring tool which helps teachers to complement their learning methods while DEDOS-Web is flexible enough to create several learning scenarios from just one set of activities, factors which lead to achieving positive learning outcomes.