Nautilus is a school furniture manufacturer whose aim is to meet needs for teaching and similar equipment, such as those of libraries and museums. It was founded in 1996 and currently has three industrial units, including a joinery and metalwork shop.
Nautilus was a groundbreaking company in this field and developed the Uni_Net interactive desks as part of a NITEC project. They were the company's answer to studies that it conducted on the best forms of teaching, when it transferred them to Portuguese schools.
This work was carried on in two joint projects with the INESC. They had the support of COMPETE as part of the technology research and development incentive scheme (SI&DT) | Jointly promoted projects Co: EI-Nautilus and QI2Learn | interactive boards in learning.
• EI-Nautilus project
The EI-Nautilus project developed two innovative products that explore the interactive classroom.
The first, called ERGOS_NETPAD + NETPHONE, is a desk with a special design and characteristics that has a technological component, the NETPAD, which offers remote graphic control. This allows students to interact with the interactive classroom system available on the teacher’s computer. The desk also has a NETPHONE, which is a device for communicating with the rest of the equipment in the room.
The second, called NET_SCHOOL, consists of a set of applications that can integrate all the equipment in the classroom to create an interactive environment and allow students and teachers to perform the following functions: classroom management, class group management, content management, knowledge management and knowledge community.
• QI2Learn | interactive boards in learning
Its main purpose is to develop multimedia contents for use on interactive boards that encourage learning.
The boards' technology is very promising thanks to its educational dynamics and enrichment of the learning process in classroom teaching.
Project goals:
1-To conduct a study of supply of training objects for this technology;
2-To develop universal contents in scientific areas for higher education;
3-To devise complementary teaching activities to explore contents;
4-To structure a digital portfolio for filing, searches and classification of educational objects for interactive boards in higher education;
5-To validate the contents developed with their potential users;
6-To disseminate and promote results at international conferences and in scientific articles and presentations at fairs and create a website.
The advantage of joint promotion in projects
The nature of the projects required a multidisciplinary team and a combination of different skills and experience.
Nautilus proved to be the ideal company, thanks to its leadership of the Portuguese market in the production of pre-school and school furniture. The Ministry of Education formally recognised the excellence of its know-how by approving the furniture the company produced.
As the organisation linked to the science and technology system, INESC Porto - Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores do Porto was the ideal partner for studying and developing practical, versatile applications that were user-friendly for teachers and students, given its recognised maturity in developing specific software.
This consortium focused on sharing complementarities and synergies between organisations with different but compatible competences. It led to the economic utilisation of the results of TR&D and generated capital gains and the social use of the same TR&D, in that the solutions put forward by the project constitute interesting responses to the growing need to modernise school equipment and therefore the approach to learning.