The Ludic Table is a tool for rehabilitation and development of the amplitude of movements of the upper limbs. Through it, shoulder and elbow movements are proposed because of the user’s touch on their segments. One or more tables can be combined in order to allow spatial movements; however, such association may incur in altering the rehabilitation effects. In order to understand whether different dispositions of the Ludic Tables can influence the movements of the upper limbs, three different organizations were analyzed using mathematical methods, extracting, from a set of 50 simulated anthropometric data, the amplitude of flexion and elbow extension, flexion, extension, adduction and abduction of the shoulder in each segment of the tables. Such analysis allowed to observe that the organization of the Ludic Tables has a direct effect on the groups of movements and on the methodology to be worked on by the physiotherapist. It was concluded that layout with axis of Ludic Tables aligned to the subject’s shoulder allow lateralizing the movements and privilege the work of shoulder abduction and elbow extension. Centralized formations, however, allow for a more equal distribution of movements and allow the development of the amplitude and opening of movements.

Stroke is a neurological syndrome resulting from the sudden interruption of blood flow. Among the symptoms/consequences of the stroke are muscle weakness in the lower and/or upper limbs, decreased sensitivity, altered fine motor skills, proprioception, and reflections. The treatment for the motor consequences is orthopedic management, in which the physiotherapist assists the individual in repetitive range of motion exercises, which can be demotivating during the treatment. The Ludic Table (LT), on the other hand, incorporates playfulness into therapy, making it a motivating tool. This research describes the comparative study between kinesiotherapy techniques and exercises using the LT, applied to the development of upper limb movements. For this, fourteen volunteers were divided into groups, submitted to interventions according to the techniques, and evaluated using systems such as goniometry, HAQ-DI, GMFM-88, and neurofunctional assessment. In general, it can be stated that regardless of the intervention, the individuals obtained gain in movements (minimum average of 7 degrees) and that the use of the LT allows the development of the angular amplitude and the reduction of the effects of spasticity. The individuals submitted to the intervention through the LT obtained the development of a greater number of articular movements of the shoulder and elbow.

O TCC é o momento no qual os alunos empregam suas habilidades técnicas e comportamentais para o desenvolvimento de um projeto multidisciplinar a fim de atingir um objetivo. Por ser a Engenharia de Computação uma área-meio, cabe aos alunos conhecer o contexto, as especificidades da área e problemática que desejam solucionar. Assim, professores e gestores devem fornecer métodos e ferramentas que permitam e favoreçam o desenvolvimento, acompanhamento e avaliação de competências necessárias para o desenvolvimento de projetos deste nível. Para tal, propõem-se um método cujas avaliações compreendem o uso de rubricas para análise de competências. Este método engloba 5 fases de trabalho: Proposta, Revisão Bibliográfica, Especificação Técnica ou Metodologia de Pesquisa, Desenvolvimento e Conclusão. Os alunos são avaliados, por meio de rubricas, que permitem acompanhar o desenvolvimento das competências necessárias para cada uma das etapas. Cada rubrica utiliza critérios, classificáveis em níveis de performance, para indicar as habilidades de uma ou mais competências. Ao final de cada ciclo, critérios, níveis de performance, fases e modelos de documentos são analisados e modificados conforme indicações do corpo docente, garantindo um processo de melhoria contínua da metodologia. Para avaliar o método proposto, professores e alunos responderam a um questionário onde classificaram os níveis de importância, em ordem de 0 a 10, da existência das rubricas (7,43+/-2,47 para alunos; 8,50+/-3,20 para professores), da conexão entre critérios e fases (8,07+/-1,49 para alunos; 8,17+/-1,72 para professores) e da clareza e assertividade dos indicadores ou níveis de desempenho (7,93+/-1,33 para alunos; 7,17+/-2,14 para professores).

Pressure injuries (LPP) are one of the biggest adverse events foundin health services and consist of damage to the body tissues ofbedridden patients, resulting from prolonged pressure on the skin.This situation impacts on the quality of life of people who developthe condition, causing physical and emotional damage to the bedridden,in addition to increasing the time and costs of hospitalization.Based on this problem, software was developed that shows thepoints of greatest pressure between the body of a bedridden patientand the bed in which he is. This software receives information fromhardware, under development, built specifically for this project.The points of greatest pressure are made available on the screenof a monitoring application, in an organized and intuitive manner.For each person, a pressure map image is generated with the valuesread and decubitus change times are suggested through alarms. Inaddition, this image can be analyzed by a health professional whocan take steps to relieve pressure points and prevent the appearanceof LPP. As a result, in tests carried out during the research, the systembuilt showed the information successfully and the objectiveswere achieved.

In Brazil, as in other countries in the world, the percentage of elderlypeople has been increasing in recent decades. This fact ismainly caused by the drop in the birth rate and the increase in theaverage life span. As a result, health care for the elderly becomesincreasingly important. Adherence to drug treatment is a clinicalchallenge for doctors who serve this population. Very old peoplehave multiple illnesses and, consequently, they use multiple medications.Some also have impaired cognitive or sensory functions,such as visual pathologies or decreased motor skills. However, nonadherenceto drug treatment can lead to the emergence of newdiseases, hospitalizations or even death. This article presents the developmentof an intelligent device that has the function of assistingdrug management, seeking the well-being of the elderly. The deviceallows the registration of the time and interval of medication intakethrough a list of products, regulated by Anvisa, pre-registeredin the system and selected according to its format. After audibleand visual warnings, the medication is dispensed automatically,allowing the medication to be ingested at the appropriate time. Itis also possible to view a drug consumption report and registrationtimes. After testing, the developed prototype was effective for thepurpose for which it was designed. The encoder system, responsiblefor monitoring and controlling the position of the medicationcompartment disc, presented an average deviation of 0.0263 mm,which prevents the overlapping of pills. At the same time, samplesof medication availability at the scheduled times showed a zeroerror rate.

In computer courses, logical reasoning is essential for understanding the structure of a computer system and for problem solving. The challenge is to provide a teaching and learning environment that enables students to understand this new paradigm of reasoning. Programming competitions are commonly considered educational methodologies capable of instigating students' critical thinking and curiosity, as well as developing teamwork skills, creative thinking and self-guided learning. The programming marathon is one of the most widespread programming competitions. This activity enables students to solve computational problems through programming skills. In general, competition problems are presented to students by complex problem statements that require reading comprehension. Students must then to implement the algorithm to solve the proposed problem using a high-level programming language. However, this competition approach requires programming skills that are still distant from beginner students who are developing their logical reasoning. For this reason, participation in competitions is generally restricted to experienced students. In order to anticipate student participation in these activities, a programming competition approach based on the algorithm interpretation is presented. Problems are presented to students through executable programs that running from terminal. The algorithm interpretation requires the execution of different input data to generate the program outputs. The available programs have the least possible interaction with the user, which requires the student to investigate the operation of the implemented algorithm. After interpreting the algorithm, students should construct the pseudocode of it. The developed pseudocode is then submitted to the virtual learning environment for evaluation by the teacher. If the algorithm is equivalent to the one implemented by the executable program, the pseudocode is considered correct. The proposed approach was applied in the laboratory discipline for the first year of the Computer Science course. The results showed that the activity was considered attractive by the students. Finally, it was observed that the proposed approach was able to increase students' awareness of the importance of testing the programs.

This computer game is portrayed as a "Journey through Curitiba", a Southern Brazilian city, which recently became a reference of smart and sustainable town. The visual design includes stylized pine nuts on the sidewalks, araucaria and ornate blue jackdaws on townhouse gates. The elements of Paranism may no longer be present in new constructions, but there are those who want to keep the symbols that refer to State of Parana, Brazil, alive. The game was created with financial support from Curitiba Cultural Foundation and Curitiba City Hall. The gameplay is mainly the history of its architectural, music and cultural movement in a playful way. Developed by undergraduate and graduate students and faculty of Positivo University, the game is a journey through the artistic and historical elements of the turn the XIX century movement. Considered an educational, leisure and art-promoting game, the second person interface permits a young woman to venture into the city alone, trying to find her artistic personality and she finds cultural elements everywhere, in which she plunges, trying to fit in with her personality. Understanding Paranism means finding meaning in the construction of an identity that today is part of the sidewalks, parks, streets and the history of the people who lives in Curitiba. The game was created in six months, during 2017 and launched during Curitiba International Music Summer Festival. The sound track is original piano music written by the composer Brasilia Itibere da Cunha (born in Paranagua, Brazil in 1846 and died in Berlin, Germany, in 1913). It is available for Mac, Windows and Linux free of charge.

The teaching of engineering is based on the practical experimentation of the effects of physical and mathematical theories about the material world. In any engineering modality, whether Computing, Electrical, Mechanical, or Civil, the mathematical modeling of a problem will allow us to understand the characteristics and variables that influence a situation, but only their practical application will make it possible to observe the influence of real world factors on a given solution. The design of new teaching and learning methodologies implies the development or definition of new tools that allow, in addition to the acquisition of knowledge, the promotion of perception about the relationship of effects and their application to the material world, which is essentially incorporated through practical work. Practical work, however, requires teachers and universities to work on maintaining expensive space, infrastructure, and equipment, which often requires qualified personnel. Another difficulty inherent in the use of this equipment and infrastructure is that students' free time is not necessarily compatible with the hours available for laboratory use. Although the use of simulators is often economically viable, these tools are pedagogically limiting as they do not allow testing of case studies that encompass all possible real-world interference variables. In courses involving some level of electronics, the use of simulators can pose an even greater problem, as lack of practice can prevent the student from developing skills for circuit development, tooling and interpretation of data from test equipment. Thus, this work describes the development of an educational kit, accessible to students, of oscilloscope and signal generator controlled by a computer system. The signal generation system was capable of displaying output signals up to 100 kHz in sawtooth, sine triangular and square waveforms with average error of less than 3%. Regarding the acquisition of signals through the oscilloscope, the oscilloscope allowed the visualization of signals up to 1.8 kHz with up to 3.6 V without the use of active probes.

Distance learning is the modality of education whose primary objective is the dispersion of knowledge reaching students wherever they live or want to study. The term education or distance learning denotes the physical and temporal separation between teacher and student who, unlike campus-based or face-to-face teaching, begin to work in an isolated and desynchronized way. Distance learning allows to "customize" the educational process in order to meet specific needs that cannot be met by face-to-face methodologies, such as geographical distance and restrictive physical health conditions. Furthermore, it also allows the student to develop skills and competencies through autonomous learning. Contrary to what one imagines, distance learning has been used in the university educational process since the 19th century. Progress and constant technological renewal have enabled distance learning to gain a new outfit through computerized methods and active teaching methodologies. In an ambiguous way, the technological advance allowed access to information and the accelerated development and propagation of distance learning, requiring the teacher to play the role of facilitator, mediator, and stimulator of collective interaction, while the availability of teacher, compared to the student's temporal freedom, is not total. In view of this concern, we propose the development of an autonomous communication interface (chatterbot), which will help students solve academic doubts through natural language questions. The tool will look for the best answer in a knowledge base. The knowledge base will be populated by artificial intelligence, able to read classroom materials provided by the teacher, and validated by a professional.

Discussions about why and how to use robotics in schools usually raise financial concerns and worries when preparing the pedagogic planning. Papert, who was a big supporter of computing in schools, said that robotics brings the possibility of many new ideas, somehow motivating creativity and seeding a cultural change, able to help in the formation of new relations with knowledge. In this fashion, there is a new set of possibilities in teaching and learning, gaining new opportunities, such as the creation of an abstract world of symbols that allows testing ideas and hypotheses, as well as providing different forms of interaction between people and machines. In this scenario, this paper presents the design, construction, and development of an inexpensive mountable robotic kit, that uses block pieces easy to buy. The kit is simple and facilitates the assembling of different objects, like an elevator, a small robot, a spinning wheel, and others. Besides the robotic kit, an IDE (Integrated Development Environment), which can be used to program the kit graphically, was also developed. The primary objective is to assist in early childhood education, introducing the children to concepts of logic and programming, in a hands-on, pervasive, and interactive approach.

Obstetric brachial plexus lesions (OBPL) are caused by the lesion or rupture of the cervical and thoracic nerves during birth. Physical therapy, based on ludic activities, can be useful to improve the OBPL treatment in children. This paper proposes a rehabilitation platform with a ludic interface (lights and sounds), using the magnitude motion gain of a user to aid in the OBPL treatment. The motor development table (MDT) is an electronic platform composed of eight light segments (with green and red LEDs) that detect the touch of a child’s hand (by optic proximity sensors). Each touch generates a different sound, depending on the exercise. The physiotherapist can choose the MDT game, and the child score can be recorded. The operation of the rehabilitation platform was tested in relation to its behavior depending on the environmental lighting, its efficiency in data processing, and its maximum distance of drive. We also applied an opinion survey. The tests showed that the MDT can be used in environments with up to 1015 lx of illumination and that the incidence of high-intensity light affects the segments’ ability to detect the hand. In addition, the tests demonstrated that the behavior of this device is not affected by the number of errors or triggers performed during the exercises. Based on these findings and on the opinion survey, it is possible to conclude that the MDT can reliably assist the physiotherapist in orthopedic management by providing feedback from the sessions and the patients’ temporal progress.

Problem-based learning activities are often debated in academic and pedagogical centers. Active methodologies have presented good results in student training. Their use, approaches, techniques, and the environment in which they are inserted make a great deal of difference in results, as well as in students' openness and willingness to accomplish activities. To provide an opportunity to work with research, logical reasoning, and contact with the heuristic computational language, course work on Prolog programming was employed within the Mathematical Logic course in the Computer Science undergraduate program. The methodology applied started with approaching logical propositions, truth table, logical operators, logical equivalences, and propositional algebra. This was followed by laboratory practice with structured programming language using pseudocode. At the second half of the course, introduction to the Prolog programming language was carried out and the methodology proposed followed the PBL approach. The activity planned was to be developed by pairs at most, the theme of what would be programmed was to be chosen by each team, as long as validated by the professor, and the final product should have a corporate objective. Since Prolog acts in a heuristic manner, research was necessary by the students so that they could successfully carry out their final delivery. In this case, the professor acted as a mediator, answering questions, making materials available and guiding the search for solutions to the problem proposed. This approach changed the way student participate in the classroom, from listening to lectures to a more pro-active participation, solving real problems.

In this paper, we explore the Problem-Based Learning (PBL) active methodology in the Industrial Engineering Program. We present and discuss the use of this methodology during the years of 2014 and 2015, as well as its effectiveness, when developing specific professional skills, and as an educational motivational tool. The proposal was to bring real-world problems to the classroom, letting the students get involved with the scenarios and working on ways to propose a solution. In 2014 we formed a partnership with the Tecnogran Revestimentos company, which allowed our fourth-year students to analyze their flooring production line. The aim was to indicate improvements concerning cost and effectiveness in the presented processes. For students, the primary objective was to develop solutions that could be implemented in the company, with the motivation to have professional experience in their curriculum. In 2015 the work was carried out with Porcelanas Bordignon, but this time with the participation of second, third and fourth-year students. The professors divided the topics into quality control development, with the second-year students; development improvement of productive processes, with third and fourth-year students. Porcelanas Bordignon developed its operations in the same way for generations. The analysis by our students helped in the development of solutions aiming at the optimization of their production line and in the quality improvement of their processes. At the end of this study, Porcelanas Bordignon adopted two suggestions of our students. The responsible professors understood the idea of this experiment and adopted it as a teaching methodology, not just as an extra class work. Professors participation was a preponderant factor to obtain the excellent results we observed during those years. They acted as motivators and guides to our students, leading them to achieve functional solutions. Final analysis of these experiments showed that student motivation and the development of competencies were appreciably improved. As the PBL methodology became usual in our program, it has been possible to notice significant improvements not only in the development of the students, concerning their abilities and skills, but also in the development of our professors when using this methodology. Furthermore, the results obtained helped to elevate the concept of our program, which today is considered, by the Brazilian Government, one of the best programs in Southern Brazil and the best in the State of Parana.

We are heading for a new era in education, with the association between fully disseminated teaching methodologies and the so-called active learning. Moreover, there is a growing interest in the changing profile of higher education students. The use of teaching methodologies in which the student takes on a more active role in the learning process may lead to an increased academic performance. However, are those methods efficient in more theoretical courses in which high levels of abstraction are required? In this study, we investigate the effect of active learning methodologies (Just-in-Time Teaching, Peer Instruction, and Problem-Based Learning) in courses of the Computer Engineering Program. We evaluate the academic performance, the students' evasion and the pass/fail mean of 48 students distributed into Control Group and Experimental Group. Preliminary results showed that 91% of students in the Experimental Group rated the methodologies positively. They had a better performance when compared both to themselves in previous bimesters (up to 3 points) and to the Control Group (mean performance increased by 0.7 points).

Este trabalho descreve a implementacao, construcao e a validacao de um dispositivo para desenvolvimento de exercicios fisioterapeuticos visando o tratamento da Paralisia Obstetrica do Plexo Braquial. O projeto consiste em uma mesa de exercicio, denominada mesa de desenvolvimento motor e um software de controle de execucao, historico de exercicios, cadastro de pacientes, cadastro e historico de medidas goniometricas. A mesa de desenvolvimento motor, construida em madeira, composta por 8 placas de circuito impresso, chamadas segmentos, cada qual constituida por matrizes de LEDs e sensores infravermelhos, permite ao fisioterapeuta a execucao de exercicios personalizados para cada paciente, baseados no toque com a mao, do usuario, em um segmento acionado e afericao atraves de sensores opticos. Quando o usuario toca o segmento indicado pela mesa, luzes verdes sao acionadas juntamente com a sonorizacao de um nota musical. Quando e tocado um segmento que nao foi indicado pela mesa, um sinal vermelho acusa o erro no exercicio. Os exercicios executados sao mediados por um sistema embarcado que envia ao software de controle dados de tempo de execucao e erros cometidos durante o exercicio. O software, por sua vez, permite que o fisioterapeuta acompanhe o progresso das sessoes de cada um de seus pacientes atraves de graficos construidos a partir dos dados de exercicios executados na mesa de desenvolvimento motor e nas medidas goniometricas, cadastradas manualmente pelo profissional a cada sessao. Observando-se os objetivos propostos para este trabalho, pode-se afirmar que o projeto alcancou bons resultados. Atraves da analise dos testes aplicados a solucao, a fim de verificar padroes de comportamento em relacao a iluminacao ambiente, tempo de resposta e ate mesmo a opiniao do publico, observou-se que a Mesa de Desenvolvimento motor mostrou-se uma solucao ludica de facil utilizacao, integracao e que oferece ao profissional o controle sobre o exercicio, seus resultados e o progresso do paciente.

Objective: Present the main sources of research and medical-surgical teaching available on the worldwide web, facilitating the increasingly necessary academic upgrading of the surgeons. Discussion: The worldwide web is a resource with a growing presence. Medical sites, including those which focus on surgical education by providing classes, lectures, demonstrations of surgical techniques and others, are multiplying. The interaction between surgeons and the communication resources that information technology offers already make the availability of real-time communication with operating rooms a reality . Conclusion: The near future promises a broad and extremely beneficial relationship between these two areas of science, ever more interdependent, with a common goal: the benefit of our patients.

With the advent of technology and digital inclusion, people of all social classes have been presented to the computing world. However, there is a population that, by physical limitations, has no easy and non-expensive means of interacting with a microcomputer, the motor-disabled individuals. This project presents an assistive technology system, which helps motor-disabled individuals to interact with a personal computer, consisting of a control system that captures the individual movements of the tongue and sends the signals to control the computer. A virtual keyboard, with the ability to complete words based on the user’s vocabulary, is also proposed, improving even more one’s experience. Experiments in real use scenarios are presented to state the feasibility of the system. KeywordsAssistive technology, computer control system, motor-disabled individual.