ABSTRACT
The impact of the COVID-19 crisis on education has opened new doors and accelerated change, and a learning opportunity has emerged towards the digital transformation of teaching models. Computing acquires a new relevance and fits into the plan to strengthen digital skills as a driver of digital knowledge, particularly relevant for children and young people. In parallel, both the close contact with computers allows the development of skills such as logical reasoning, critical thinking, creativity, communication and teamwork, and the very coexistence of citizens with digital technologies requires the prior acquisition of this knowledge, in order to be prepared to meet the new demands of modern society. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to introduce an ongoing research project that aims at developing young children's expression through embodied computing in order to enhance their digital knowledge, by adapting the digital manipulative (DM) Mobeybou for storytelling and narrative creation as a tool for promoting computational thinking (CT) and inherent competences through a bodily expression experience. The educational toolkit and base literature review are discussed, and the early prototypes of the programming language proposed are presented, as well as the ongoing and future work. With this initial work it was possible to conclude that computer programming has many benefits in fostering CT in children, alongside other cognitive skills, as well as the importance of stimulating children's expression and communication that are transversal to all areas of life. Therefore, computer programming will be used and incorporated in Mobeybou in order to achieve the research aims proposed in this paper and promote children's expression through CT development. © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery.
ABSTRACT
Understanding customer sentiment associated with delivery solutions, such as smart lockers, is an area of increasing interest for package delivery companies. Applications of this data could result in cost savings through vehicle route planning, cross docking, fleet size optimization, and increased placement of smart locker technology for stop reduction. However, there has been little effort applied to gathering information related to public sentiment applications to last mile package delivery. Therefore, through a survey instrument we gather sentiment data related to smart lockers for review and analysis. Sentiment analysis by region (suburban, urban, and rural) is accomplished through a survey instrument with the goal of understanding the difference in sentiment by region and the effects of COVID-19 on customer sentiment towards the use of smart lockers. Some significant findings were that suburban residents were willing to travel further to pick-up a package from a smart locker (α = 0.01) and previous experience was correlated with increased sentiment (α = 0.05). © 2022, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.