Increasing Faculty Knowledge and Empathy Related to Nursing Students with Learning Disabilities

The purpose of this paper is to provide a project overview for the implementation of a disability training module and simulation experience offered to university school of nursing faculty to increase faculty knowledge and empathy related to nursing students with learning disabilities. The number of students with learning disabilities in the postsecondary education setting has tripled in the past decade (Orr & Hammig, 2009). This growing student population makes faculty preparation essential in order to effectively meet the needs of these students. The literature indicated that best practices include disability training, faculty support, student support, inclusive strategies such as Universal Design, and positive relationships. A Gap analysis indicated deficiencies related to best practices which supports the need for and benefit of disability training for faculty at project site university school of nursing. Offering faculty a disability training module and simulation experience provides faculty with the opportunity to increase knowledge related to the American Disabilities Act (ADA), required accommodations, learning disabilities, and Universal Design strategies. The simulation was designed to simulate the experience of a student with a learning disability. The Inclusive Teaching Strategies Inventory (Lombardi, Vukovic, & Sala-Bars, 2014) is a validated tool which was used to measure faculty knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions pre and post disability training. The Kiersma-Chen Empathy Scale (Chen, Kiersma, Yehle, & Plake, 2015) was used to measure empathy in the pre and post simulation experience

Attuning a mobile simulation game for school children using a design-based research approach

We report on a design-based research study that was conducted over nine months. It chronicles the development and implementation of HeartRun, a cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training approach for school children. Comparable to an unexpected emergency, HeartRun consists of authentic activities involving different roles, game tasks, locations and physical objects to support process-oriented learning for first responders. It aims to enhance the psychological preparedness of the rescuer and thus promotes a more prompt and appropriate response. In this paper, we describe a cycle of three design-based research (DBR) studies in which HeartRun was explored with school children. In order to better understand how to design mobile game environments that support dimensions of seamless learning, we analysed children and their knowledge-building practices while learning with HeartRun. The mobile game has evolved significantly from its initial conception through an iterative process of (re) designing and testing the synchronization between physical and digital worlds, learner collaboration and ubiquitous knowledge access, i.e. dimensions of mobile seamless learning activities. Based on our experiences, we conclude by discussing challenges and shortcomings of mobile game-based learning environments.This research was financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), regions of the Euregio Meuse-Rhine and the participating institutions under the INTERREG IVa programme (EMR.INT4-1.2.-2011-04/070, http://www.emurgency.eu)

The Multimodal Tutor: Adaptive Feedback from Multimodal Experiences

This doctoral thesis describes the journey of ideation, prototyping and empirical testing of the Multimodal Tutor, a system designed for providing digital feedback that supports psychomotor skills acquisition using learning and multimodal data capturing. The feedback is given in real-time with machine-driven assessment of the learner's task execution. The predictions are tailored by supervised machine learning models trained with human annotated samples. The main contributions of this thesis are: a literature survey on multimodal data for learning, a conceptual model (the Multimodal Learning Analytics Model), a technological framework (the Multimodal Pipeline), a data annotation tool (the Visual Inspection Tool) and a case study in Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation training (CPR Tutor). The CPR Tutor generates real-time, adaptive feedback using kinematic and myographic data and neural networks

Presence and television.

Film and a number of emerging entertainment technologies offer media consumers an illusion of nonmediation known as presence. To investigate the possibility that television can evoke presence, 65 undergraduate students were shown brief examples of rapid point-of-view movement from commercially available videotapes on a television with either a small screen (12 inches [30.5 cm], measured diagonally) or a large screen (46 inches [116.8 cm]). Participants\u27 responses were measured via a questionnaire and a computer-based recording of arousal (electrodermal activity). Viewers of both televisions reported an enjoyable sense of physical movement, excitement, involvement, and a sense of participation. Furthermore, as predicted, participants who watched the large screen television thought the movement in the scenes was faster, experienced a greater sense of physical movement, enjoyed the movement to a greater extent, found the viewing experience more exciting, and were more physiologically aroused. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed

NEUVis: Comparing Affective and Effective Visualisation

Data visualisations are useful for providing insight from complex scientific data. However, even with visualisation, scientific research is difficult for non-scientists to comprehend. When developed by designers in collaboration with scientists, data visualisation can be used to articulate scientific data in a way that non-experts can understand. Creating human-centred visualisations is a unique challenge, and there are no frameworks to support their design. In response, this thesis presents a practice-led study investigating design methods that can be used to develop Non-Expert User Visualisations (NEUVis), data visualisations for a general public, and the response that people have to different kinds of NEUVis. For this research, two groups of ten users participated in quantitative studies, informed by Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba’s method of Naturalistic Inquiry, which asked non-scientists to express their cognitive and emotional response to NEUVis using different media. The three different types of visualisations were infographics, 3D animations and an interactive installation. The installation used in the study, entitled 18S rDNA, was developed and evaluated as part of this research using John Zimmerman’s Research Through Design methodology. 18S rDNA embodies the knowledge and design methods that were developed for this research, and provided an opportunity for explication of the entire NEUVis design process. The research findings indicate that developing visualisations for the non-expert audience requires a new process, different to the way scientists visualise data. The result of this research describes how creative practitioners collaborate with primary researchers and presents a new human-centred design thinking model for NEUVis. This model includes two design tools. The first tool helps designers merge user needs with data they wish to visualise. The second tool helps designers take that merged information and begin an iterative, user-centred design process

Mobile Games for Learning:A Pattern-Based Approach

The core concern of this thesis is the design of mobile games for learning. The conditions and requirements that are vital in order to make mobile games suitable and effective for learning environments are investigated. The base for exploration is the pattern approach as an established form of templates that provide solutions for recurrent problems. Building on this acknowledged form of exchanging and re-using knowledge, patterns for game design are used to classify the many gameplay rules and mechanisms in existence. This research draws upon pattern descriptions to analyze learning game concepts and to abstract possible relationships between gameplay patterns and learning outcomes. The linkages that surface are the starting bases for a series of game design concepts and their implementations are subsequently evaluated with regard to learning outcomes. The findings and resulting knowledge from this research is made accessible by way of implications and recommendations for future design decisions

“Like Popcorn”: crossmodal correspondences between scents, 3D shapes and emotions in children

There is increasing interest in multisensory experiences in HCI. However, little research considers how sensory modali- ties interact with each other and how this may impact interac- tive experiences. We investigate how children associate emo- tions with scents and 3D shapes. 14 participants (10-17yrs) completed crossmodal association tasks to attribute emo- tional characteristics to variants of the “Bouba/Kiki” stimuli, presented as 3D tangible models, in conjunction with lemon and vanilla scents. Our findings support pre-existing map- pings between shapes and scents, and confirm the associa- tions between the combination of angular shapes (“Kiki”) and lemon scent with arousing emotion, and of round shapes (“Bouba”) and vanilla scent with calming emotion. This ex- tends prior work on crossmodal correspondences in terms of stimuli (3D as opposed to 2D shapes), sample (children), and conveyed content (emotions). We outline how these find- ings can contribute to designing more inclusive interactive multisensory technologies