Learning About E-Safety Rules While Playing: Creation of an Interactive Test With CoSpaces Edu

Introduction

The current changes in our society, as well as the needs that are arising as a result of ever-increasing technological developments, call for new methodological approaches that provide the necessary teaching and learning models to promote the development of skills related to creativity and problem-solving in our students. Moreover, this has to be linked to the acquisition of scientific and technological competences that help to solve new situations that may appear in the future (Casado Fernández & Checa Romero, 2020).

In order to respond to this need or concern, it is important to consider the term STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and the term STEAM, which can be understood as an extension of this idea by adding the field of Arts. This terminology does not refer directly to any methodology but refers to a field and includes all the educational elements that can be useful to complete a work (Domènech-Casal et al., 2019).

Therefore, the term STEM can be seen as a (variable and growing) panel of technological tools, pedagogical perspectives and methodological approaches (Couso, 2017) that are considered useful for the purposes of contextualized work in the field of the disciplines to which it refers. Thus, as an extension of this idea, the term STEAM is presented as a model of how the traditional subjects of science, technology, engineering and mathematics can be structured in a curricular framework integrated with artistic fields (Yakman, 2008; Colucci-Gray et al., 2019).

More specifically for this work, one of the key factors for the development of this experience is the inclusion of practices linked to computational thinking in the curriculum. Today it is easy to carry out this type of integrated practice thanks to the large variety of programming languages and resources that can be found for students at any educational level. This not only allows our students to approach programming concepts, but it also allows them to take an important step away from being just consumers of technology and become creators. To develop digital skills within this field of literacy so necessary today, it is not enough to know how to chat, search or interact. It is necessary to know how to design, create and invent new multimedia content (Resnick, 2007).

The STEAM experience described in this chapter is an activity carried out under the European project co-funded by Erasmus+ KA229 “Heads up. Heads up! Young TechnoLingua Empathic Minds”, which aims to promote and develop educational practices that help our students to improve their competence and digital literacy through interdisciplinary practices. As part of this educational program, this work consists in developing a decalogue of good practices related to cybersecurity on the Internet and creating an interactive questionnaire in a virtual reality environment to share and disseminate this type of content with students.

In the same way that an Erasmus+ program is contextualized, the present work is designed to enable our students to achieve the following objectives:

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  To improve digital safety issues in our pupils: their digital lives and the Internet safety catalogue.

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  To acquire the necessary skills and abilities to work effectively and safely with all the information and resources that can be found on the Internet, always ensuring the security of their personal information and making correct use of the content they have access to.

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  To know basic Internet security rules.

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  To develop computational thinking skills using block-based visual programming languages.

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  To work on the contents and skills of a foreign language within the framework of a STEAM project.

For the programming and creation of the interactive quiz, we used the educational virtual creation software CoSpaces Edu. This program combines the possibility of creating your own 360º virtual reality scenario with the potential to code the actions and objects included in the scene through text code or programming blocks (Frydenberg & Andone, 2019).