Fostering young smart citizens through personal learning environments for urban inquiries

The aim of this qualitative study is to investigate how young citizens engage with urban inquiries activities on Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). This work analyses how educators can design and assess short inquiry activities as well as how students use a PLE to interact and collaborate for creating scientific questions. Participants of this qualitative study were 5 researchers from Higher Education, 2 science teachers and a class with 26 teenagers of a secondary school in the UK. The outcomes indicate the most popular pedagogical tools used by teachers and researchers, the most used co-inquiry components by learners, difficulties and recommendations for implementing urban inquiries through two open platforms: weSPOT and nQuire.