Digital technologies are increasingly present in young children's lives. How can early education systems get the best out of digitalisation while minimising its risks? This is especially urgent as the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated our reliance on digital tools -- tools that enabled young children to continue learning when early education…

Inspired by the positive impact of serious games on science understanding and motivated by personal interests in scientific outreach, we developed "Bacttle," an easy-to-play microbiology board game with adaptive difficulty, targeting any player from 7 years old onward. Bacttle addresses both the lay public and teachers for use in…

Integrating computer science (CS) into school curricula has become a worldwide preoccupation. Therefore, we present a CS and Robotics integration model and its validation through a large-scale pilot study in the administrative region of the Canton Vaud in Switzerland. Approximately 350 primary school teachers followed a mandatory CS continuing…

Information Literacy (IL) has been named a key competence for the twentyfirst century and is being progressively introduced in many compulsory school curricula. Nonetheless, the actual implementation of effective IL education cannot be carried out without the sound preparation of teachers. This study explores the naïve, pre-instruction conceptions…

We present a multi-method design for elucidating young, mostly illiterate children's (grades 1 and 2 of Swiss elementary school, ages 6-8) ideas about energy. The design uses semi-structured interviews and video recordings as the main methods of data generation and collection, respectively. A plurality of tasks, including drawing, sorting and a…

Center-based child care has been struggling with poor health and high turnover rates of child care staff and their adverse impact on care quality for decades. Yet little is known about personal and structural antecedents of job resources and job demands that are valid predictors of health and turnover in the child care workforce. Research…

This article presents the design, implementation and outcomes of AlpConnectar, a Swiss project that exploits technologies for digitally-supported language exchange (LE) in primary schools. Launched in 2013, the project involves three Swiss cantons where different languages are spoken (namely German, French and Italian) and respectively taught as…

Nowadays, there is a consensus that good teaching and learning needs instructional variation and personalised forms of learning. In teacher education, these concepts have been implemented for years, and prospective teachers are taught accordingly; it is thus assumed that the teaching of novice teachers is in accordance with these new teaching…

The longitudinal intervention study reported here is the first to investigate the efficiency of computer learning software specifically designed for dyslexic Swiss German learners of Standard German as a second language (L2) and English as a third language (L3). A total of 40 subjects (20 of them dyslexics and 20 of them nondyslexics; 10 students…