Emergency remote teaching is a temporary change in the way education occurs, whereby an educational system unexpectedly becomes entirely remote. This article analyzes the motivation of students undertaking a university course over one semester of emergency remote teaching in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. University students undertaking a programming course were surveyed three times during one semester, about motivation and COVID concern. This work explores which student motivation profiles existed, how motivation evolved, and whether concern about the pandemic was a factor affecting motivation throughout the course. The most adaptive profile was highly motivated, more prepared and less frustrated by the conditions of the course. However, this cluster experienced the highest levels of COVID-19 concern. The least adaptive cluster behaved as a mirror image of the most adaptive cluster. Clear differences were found between the clusters that showed the most and least concern about COVID-19.

Due to the proliferation of technology in daily life and the growing number of ways in which humans and machines interact, the process of designing interactive elements has become critical. Nevertheless, design students are seldom able to design and implement interactive elements because of their limited programming skills. Although there have been some approaches to teach computational thinking using physical computing and focusing on solving real-world problems (e.g., electronic devices such as Arduino, using sensors and actuators), they often entail monetary expenses and require knowledgeable instructors, and are not catered to students without prior programming or electronics knowledge. Hence, we propose the use of Protobject, a low-cost tool that focuses on real-world applications that could be used to teach programming to design students. This study aims to evaluate students’ perceptions regarding the usability of Protobject as a tool for learning computational thinking, as well as the clarity of the learning activities designed to teach computational thinking concepts by using Protobject.

Multimorbidity is defined as the presence of two or more chronic medical conditions in a person, whether physical, mental or long-term infectious diseases. This is especially common in older populations, affecting their quality of life and emotionally impacting their caregivers and family. Technology can allow for monitoring, managing, and motivating older adults in their self-care, as well as supporting their caregivers. However, when several conditions are present at once, it may be necessary to manage several types of technologies, or for technology to manage the interaction between conditions. This work aims to understand and describe the technologies that are used to support the management of multimorbidity for older adults. We conducted a systematic review of ten years of scientific literature from four online databases. We reviewed a corpus of 681 research papers, finally including 25 in our review. The technologies used most frequently by older adults with multimorbidity are mobile applications and websites, and they are mostly focused on communication and connectivity. We then propose opportunities for future research on addressing the challenges in the management of several simultaneous health conditions, potentially creating a better approach than managing each condition as if it were independent.