Argotario: Computational Argumentation Meets Serious Games

An important skill in critical thinking and argumentation is the ability to spot and recognize fallacies. Fallacious arguments, omnipresent in argumentative discourse, can be deceptive, manipulative, or simply leading to `wrong moves' in a discussion. Despite their importance, argumentation scholars and NLP researchers with focus on argumentation quality have not yet investigated fallacies empirically. The nonexistence of resources dealing with fallacious argumentation calls for scalable approaches to data acquisition and annotation, for which the serious games methodology offers an appealing, yet unexplored, alternative. We present Argotario, a serious game that deals with fallacies in everyday argumentation. Argotario is a multilingual, open-source, platform-independent application with strong educational aspects, accessible at www.argotario.net.Comment: EMNLP 2017 demo paper. Source codes: https://github.com/UKPLab/argotari

Thereʼs no ʻIʼ in ʻEmergency Management Team:ʼ designing and evaluating a serious game for training emergency managers in group decision making skills

Serious games are games that are designed to educate rather than entertain. The game outlined and evaluated here was commissioned and designed as a tool to improve the group decision making skills of people who manage real-world emergencies such as floods, fires, volcanoes and chemical spills. The game design exploits research on decision making groups and applies pedagogically sound games design principles. An evaluation of the game design was carried out based on a paper prototype. Eight participants were recruited and assigned to two groups of four participants each. These groups were video recorded while playing the game and the video was analysed in terms of game actions and member participation. Results indicate that the group who behaved in a more appropriate manner for a decision making group were rewarded with more positive feedback from the game state. These findings suggest that the game itself delivers appropriate feedback to players on their collaborative behaviour and is thus fit for the purposes intended in the current project

Prince Charming has Perfect White Teeth: Performativity and Media Education

This paper argues that Judith Butler’s post structuralist theory of performativity provides a valuable tool for understanding how students might contest prevailing hegemonic gender discourses in media education classrooms. It suggests an alternative to structuralist "empowerment" and "critical pedagogy" approaches, which continue to motivate many media educators, despite serious questions being asked about their effectiveness. The paper draws on data collected from a unit of work about video games, completed by year ten students at an all boys’ secondary school in Brisbane. It argues that many media related activities fail to elicit genuinely "critical" responses because they are complicit in the regulation of hegemonic discourses. It suggests that teachers are more likely to create the potential for variation in their students’ gender performances if activities are dialogic and open-ended and avoid placing emphasis on discourses of excellence and competition

Responsible research and innovation in science education: insights from evaluating the impact of using digital media and arts-based methods on RRI values

The European Commission policy approach of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is gaining momentum in European research planning and development as a strategy to align scientific and technological progress with socially desirable and acceptable ends. One of the RRI agendas is science education, aiming to foster future generations' acquisition of skills and values needed to engage in society responsibly. To this end, it is argued that RRI-based science education can benefit from more interdisciplinary methods such as those based on arts and digital technologies. However, the evidence existing on the impact of science education activities using digital media and arts-based methods on RRI values remains underexplored. This article comparatively reviews previous evidence on the evaluation of these activities, from primary to higher education, to examine whether and how RRI-related learning outcomes are evaluated and how these activities impact on students' learning. Forty academic publications were selected and its content analysed according to five RRI values: creative and critical thinking, engagement, inclusiveness, gender equality and integration of ethical issues. When evaluating the impact of digital and arts-based methods in science education activities, creative and critical thinking, engagement and partly inclusiveness are the RRI values mainly addressed. In contrast, gender equality and ethics integration are neglected. Digital-based methods seem to be more focused on students' questioning and inquiry skills, whereas those using arts often examine imagination, curiosity and autonomy. Differences in the evaluation focus between studies on digital media and those on arts partly explain differences in their impact on RRI values, but also result in non-documented outcomes and undermine their potential. Further developments in interdisciplinary approaches to science education following the RRI policy agenda should reinforce the design of the activities as well as procedural aspects of the evaluation research

Afterschool for the Global Age

Summarizes discussions from a July 2006 convening on model afterschool programs and best practices for enhancing global literacy, including innovative uses of community and international connections, project-based learning, and educational technology

Using gaming paratexts in the literacy classroom

This paper illustrates how digital game paratexts may effectively be used in the high school English to meet a variety of traditional and multimodal literacy outcomes. Paratexts are texts that refer to digital gaming and game cultures, and using them in the classroom enables practitioners to focus on and valorise the considerable literacies and skills that young people develop and deploy in their engagement with digital gaming and game cultures. The effectiveness of valorizing paratexts in this manner is demonstrated through two examples of assessment by students in classes where teachers had designed curriculum and assessment activities using paratexts

When Memories Make a Difference: Multimodal Literacy Narratives for Preservice ELA Methods Students

This article examines multimodal literacy narrative projects designed by students in a methods of teaching course for secondary preservice English Language Arts teachers. For the multimodal project, preservice teachers infused written, audio, and visual text using a variety of creative mediums. Through combined theoretical frames, the researcher explores semiotics and preservice teachers’ use of multiliteracies as they shift their conceptions of what it means to compose. Finally, this article explores how the act of reflection through the literacy narrative influences preservice teachers’ notions of teaching composition through a variety of mediums

A digital library of language learning exercises

Recent years have seen widespread adoption of the Internet for language teaching and learning. Interactive systems on the World-Wide Web provide useful alternatives to face-to-face tuition, and both teachers and learners can benefit from the exercises available. However, although there is a wealth of suitable material, it is hard to find because it is scattered around the web. Moreover, teachers are restricted by the material that is available, and cannot provide their own. To tackle these problems we have constructed a digital library of language learning exercises that presents students with different kinds of exercise, and also lets teachers contribute new material. We first reviewed existing language learning systems on the web in order to develop a taxonomy of exercise types used for language activity. A prototype, ELLE, based on this taxonomy, provides various kinds of interactive exercises using material that teachers submit. The system has been evaluated by practicing language teachers

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion