17,948 research outputs found

    Computational Thinking and Its Mathematics Origins through Purposeful Music Mixing with African American High School Students

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    Computational thinking (CT) is being advocated as core knowledge needed by all students—particularly, students from underrepresented groups—to prepare for the 21st century (Georgia Department of Education, 2017; Smith, 2016, 2017; The White House, 2017; Wing, 2006, 2014). The K–12 Computer Science Frameworks (2016), written by a national steering committee, defines CT as “the thought processes involved in expressing solutions as computational steps or algorithms that can be carried out by a computer” (p. 68). This project investigated current national introductory CT curricula and their related programming platforms used in high schools. In particular, the study documents the development, implementation, and quantitative outcomes of a purposeful introductory CT curriculum framed by an eclectic theoretical perspective (Stinson, 2009) that included culturally relevant pedagogy and critical play through a computational music remixing platform known as EarSketch. This purposeful introductory CT curriculum, designed toward engaging African American high school students, was implemented with a racially diverse set of high school students to quantitatively measure their engagement and CT content knowledge change. The goal of the project was to increase engagement and CT content knowledge of all student participants, acknowledging that what benefits African American students tends to benefit all students (Hilliard, 1992; Ladson-Billings, 2014). An analysis of the findings suggests that there was a significant increase in student cognitive engagement for racially diverse participants though not for the subset of African American students. Affective and conative engagement did not significantly change for racially diverse participants nor for the African American student subset. However, both the racially diverse set of students’ and their subset of African American students’ CT content knowledge significantly increased. As well, there was no significant difference between African American students and non-African American students post-survey engagement and CT content knowledge post-assessment means when adjusted for their pre-survey engagement and pre-assessment knowledge respectively. Hence, showing that purposeful music mixing using EarSketch designed toward African American students benefitted a racially diverse set of students in cognitive engagement and CT content knowledge and the African American subset of students in CT content knowledge. Implications and recommendations for further study are discussed

    Factors Affecting Consumers’ Green Purchasing Behavior: An Integrated Conceptual Framework

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    In this modern era of societal marketing business ethics and social responsibility are becoming the guiding themes for marketing strategies and practices. Within the field of ethics and social responsibility environmental and green marketing topics are the central topics, which are closely related to biodiversity and sustainability. This paper suggests a different approach to assessing the variables of consumers’ green purchasing behavior. Based on thoroughly researched secondary data, this conceptual paper suggests a framework integrating the so far incoherent frameworks as proposed by previous authors. Emanating from this eclectic and chronological literature review, the paper will also propose further missing links that need to be included in the proposed integrated framework. Based on this holistic framework, in a future study, the authors will explain a sustainability index of green consumer behavior, which will be tested empirically in the study. In fact, from the proposed integrated framework, in total eight vital factors/aspects of green/environmental issues are likely to have an impact on consumer green purchasing behavior. Demographic variables will play an intervening or mediating role in the framework.pro-environmental consumer behaviour, sustainability, green consumer behavior, green purchasing

    Motivating children to learn effectively: exploring the value of intrinsic integration in educational games

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    The concept of intrinsic motivation lies at the heart of the user engagement created by digital games. Yet despite this, educational software has traditionally attempted to harness games as extrinsic motivation by using them as a sugar coating for learning content. This article tests the concept of intrinsic integration as a way of creating a more productive relationship between educational games and their learning content. Two studies assessed this approach by designing and evaluating an educational game called Zombie Division to teach mathematics to 7- to 11-year-olds. Study 1 examined the learning gains of 58 children who played either the intrinsic, extrinsic, or control variants of Zombie Division for 2 hr, supported by their classroom teacher. Study 2 compared time on task for the intrinsic and extrinsic variants of the game when 16 children had free choice of which game to play. The results showed that children learned more from the intrinsic version of the game under fixed time limits and spent 7 times longer playing it in free-time situations. Together, these studies offer evidence for the genuine value of an intrinsic approach for creating effective educational games. The theoretical and commercial implications of these findings are discussed

    Sustainable Textile Marketing

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    We know that sustainability has become an important topic in every aspect of life. The textile, fashion, and material industries must also be sustainable, which could be imparted in their development, production, or even marketing. The textile industry has a huge market, as clothing is arguably the most important human need after food. Recently, this industry has been labeled as a polluting industry, a label that could be overcome by the proper development of textile goods and careful marketing strategies. There are specific roles that government, entrepreneurs, and even universities can play in properly educating people to make the textile industry cleaner and greener. Several journals focus only on one of the aspects of this key problem, i.e., the production of sustainable materials, textile education, or textile marketing. However, herein, we strive to bring different areas together on one platform to cover different aspects, i.e., production, policy, education, and marketing related to textile fashion and textile materials

    Feeling Colors: Reflections on the Creative Process of a Child with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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    This thesis explored the implications of choice in individual art therapy sessions with a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder, contrasting the creative process of unstructured expression and a more directed book-making activity focused on emotions. Research took place within the scope of six weekly 45-minute individual art therapy sessions with a 12-year-old boy in a therapeutic day school. The design of this study was based on the pre-established presenting needs of the student, focusing on growing skills for self-regulation, addressing social-emotional deficits, and providing an outlet for positive self-expression. The sessions were documented by the clinician, a clinical intern studying art therapy at the Master’s level, in clinical and personal notes. This researcher conducted an extensive literature review and applied analysis via a detailed process of response artwork and reflection. Observations and initial findings suggested prominent themes of space and containment, attunement, and connection. In result, data indicated that both directive and unstructured artistic exploration of emotion may show effective significance with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, with emphasis on the importance of growing self-efficacy in the process

    Advertising business model strategy to increase consumers' brand recognition : an exploratory study testing the benefits of a quiz structure, applying incentives and targeting ads

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    Atualmente, existe uma saturação do mercado publicitário devido aos novos meios de baixo custo. A sociedade tem acesso a ferramentas para ignorar ou evitar publicidade, nomeadamente, bloquear anúncios na internet, e passar à frente anúncios na TV. O principal objetivo deste projeto é a criação de estratégias publicitárias com o intuito de aumentar a atenção dos consumidores e, consequentemente, o reconhecimento da marca. Este modelo foi construído de forma a testar, os benefícios de uma estrutura quiz, incentivos e anúncios com targeting, de acordo com género, idade e ocupação. O presente trabalho é, de natureza descritiva e, quanto à profundidade, exploratório. Procura-se um primeiro conhecimento empírico da aceitação do modelo imaginado, através dos dados recolhidos que identificam caraterísticas e dimensões da problemática, oferecendo, no final, uma visão mais completa e clara. O desenho metodológico incluiu um simulador de quiz, associado a um inquérito por questionário, capaz de mostrar anúncios publicitários para testar a atenção de 160 participantes, e um inquérito, fundamentado na Teoria de Comportamento Planeado, para recolher a sua opinião. Após um mês, um novo questionário foi aplicado com o objetivo de avaliar o reconhecimento da marca pelos consumidores. Através do desempenho dos participantes, este estudo concluiu que a estrutura de quiz tem influência positiva na atenção e no reconhecimento da marca. Os participantes demostraram uma atitude positiva face à experiência, o que é promissor para a criação de um modelo de negócio com base nesta estratégia de publicidade. Efetivamente destacaram que seria mais fácil a sua aceitação, caso se implementasse em smartphones e se se usasse incentivos.Advertising has now cheap methods to promote products which are leading to market saturation. Nowadays, society has tools to ignore or avoid advertising, giving consumers the ability to block ads from the internet, and fast-forwarding commercials in TV. The main goal for this project was to create a business model strategy to increase consumers’ attention and consequently, brand recognition. This model was constructed to test the benefits of strategies such the implementation of a quiz structure, incentives and targeting ads, according to gender, age and occupation This research has a descriptive nature and follows and presents an exploratory study, using quantitative instruments to collect data. These instruments consisted in a quiz simulator, associated to a questionnaire, showing commercial videos, in order to test users’ attention, along with a survey, grounded in the Theory of Planned Behavior, to assess participants’ opinion. After one month, another questionnaire tested participants’ memory, with the goal of assessing consumers’ brand recognition. Results evaluated participants’ performances, influenced by each strategy, individually and combined. From participants’ performances, this research concluded that a quiz structure helps users focus on the ad and improves their brand recognition. Furthermore, incentives and targeted ads have different influence over each demographic variable, and behave different when combined with each other. From feedback, participants demonstrated a positive attitude towards the business model and highlighted that this model would be more easily accepted, implementing it in smartphones and using a reward system along with targeted ads

    Exploring the Affective Loop

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    Research in psychology and neurology shows that both body and mind are involved when experiencing emotions (Damasio 1994, Davidson et al. 2003). People are also very physical when they try to communicate their emotions. Somewhere in between beings consciously and unconsciously aware of it ourselves, we produce both verbal and physical signs to make other people understand how we feel. Simultaneously, this production of signs involves us in a stronger personal experience of the emotions we express. Emotions are also communicated in the digital world, but there is little focus on users' personal as well as physical experience of emotions in the available digital media. In order to explore whether and how we can expand existing media, we have designed, implemented and evaluated /eMoto/, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others. With eMoto, we explicitly aim to address both cognitive and physical experiences of human emotions. Through combining affective gestures for input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and animations for the background of messages, the interaction "pulls" the user into an /affective loop/. In this thesis we define what we mean by affective loop and present a user-centered design approach expressed through four design principles inspired by previous work within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) but adjusted to our purposes; /embodiment/ (Dourish 2001) as a means to address how people communicate emotions in real life, /flow/ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to reach a state of involvement that goes further than the current context, /ambiguity/ of the designed expressions (Gaver et al. 2003) to allow for open-ended interpretation by the end-users instead of simplistic, one-emotion one-expression pairs and /natural but designed expressions/ to address people's natural couplings between cognitively and physically experienced emotions. We also present results from an end-user study of eMoto that indicates that subjects got both physically and emotionally involved in the interaction and that the designed "openness" and ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and understood by our subjects. Through the user study, we identified four potential design problems that have to be tackled in order to achieve an affective loop effect; the extent to which users' /feel in control/ of the interaction, /harmony and coherence/ between cognitive and physical expressions/,/ /timing/ of expressions and feedback in a communicational setting, and effects of users' /personality/ on their emotional expressions and experiences of the interaction

    Designing for open-ended play

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    Prevalence and characteristics of game transfer phenomena: a descriptive survey study

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    Previous qualitative studies suggest that gamers experience Game Transfer Phenomena (GTP), a variety of non-volitional phenomena related to playing videogames including thoughts, urges, images, sounds when not playing. To investigate (i) which types of GTP were more common and (ii) their general characteristics, the present study surveyed a total of 2,362 gamers via an online survey. The majority of the participants were male, students, aged between 18 and 27 years, and 'hard-core' gamers. Most participants reported having experienced at least one type of GTP at some point (96.6%), the majority having experienced GTP more than once with many reporting 6 to 10 different types of GTP. Results demonstrated that videogame players experienced (i) altered visual perceptions (ii) altered auditory perceptions (iii) altered body perceptions (iv) automated mental processes, and (v) behaviors. In most cases, GTP could not be explained by being under the influence of a psychoactive substance. The GTP experiences were usually shortlived, tended to occur after videogame playing rather than during play, occurred recurrently, and usually occurred while doing day-to-day activities. One in five gamers had experienced some type of distress or dysfunction due to GTP. Many experienced GTP as pleasant and some wanted GTP to happen again

    Designing passenger experiences for in-car Mixed Reality

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    In day-to-day life, people spend a considerable amount of their time on the road. People seek to invest travel time for work and well-being through interaction with mobile and multimedia applications on personal devices such as smartphones and tablets. However, for new computing paradigms, such as mobile mixed reality (MR), their usefulness in this everyday transport context, in-car MR remains challenging. When future passengers immerse in three-dimensional virtual environments, they become increasingly disconnected from the cabin space, vehicle motion, and other people around them. This degraded awareness of the real environment endangers the passenger experience on the road, which initially motivates this thesis to question: can immersive technology become useful in the everyday transport context, such as for in-car scenarios? If so, how should we design in-car MR technology to foster passenger access and connectedness to both physical and virtual worlds, ensuring ride safety, comfort, and joy? To this aim, this thesis contributes via three aspects: 1) Understanding passenger use of in-car MR —first, I present a model for in-car MR interaction through user research. As interviews with daily commuters reveal, passengers are concerned with their physical integrity when facing spatial conflicts between borderless virtual environments and the confined cabin space. From this, the model aims to help researchers spatially organize information and how user interfaces vary in the proximity of the user. Additionally, a field experiment reveals contextual feedback about motion sickness when using immersive technology on the road. This helps refine the model and instruct the following experiments. 2) Mixing realities in car rides —second, this thesis explores a series of prototypes and experiments to examine how in-car MR technology can enable passengers to feel present in virtual environments while maintaining awareness of the real environment. The results demonstrate technical solutions for physical integrity and situational awareness by incorporating essential elements of the RE into virtual reality. Empirical evidence provides a set of dimensions into the in-car MR model, guiding the design decisions of mixing realities. 3) Transcending the transport context —third, I extend the model to other everyday contexts beyond transport that share spatial and social constraints, such as the confined and shared living space at home. A literature review consolidates leveraging daily physical objects as haptic feedback for MR interaction across spatial scales. A laboratory experiment discovers how context-aware MR systems that consider physical configurations can support social interaction with copresent others in close shared spaces. These results substantiate the scalability of the in-car MR model to other contexts. Finally, I conclude with a holistic model for mobile MR interaction across everyday contexts, from home to on the road. With my user research, prototypes, empirical evaluation, and model, this thesis paves the way for understanding the future passenger use of immersive technology, addressing today’s technical limitations of MR in mobile interaction, and ultimately fostering mobile users’ ubiquitous access and close connectedness to MR anytime and anywhere in their daily lives.Im modernen Leben verbringen die Menschen einen beträchtlichen Teil ihrer Zeit mit dem täglichen Pendeln. Die Menschen versuchen, die Reisezeit für ihre Arbeit und ihr Wohlbefinden durch die Interaktion mit mobilen und multimedialen Anwendungen auf persönlichen Geräten wie Smartphones und Tablets zu nutzen. Doch für neue Computing-Paradigmen, wie der mobilen Mixed Reality (MR), bleibt ihre Nützlichkeit in diesem alltäglichen Verkehrskontext, der MR im Auto, eine Herausforderung. Wenn künftige Passagiere in dreidimensionale virtuelle Umgebungen eintauchen, werden sie zunehmend von der Kabine, der Fahrzeugbewegung und den Menschen in ihrer Umgebung abgekoppelt. Diese verminderte Wahrnehmung der realen Umgebung gefährdet das Fahrverhalten der Passagiere im Straßenverkehr, was diese Arbeit zunächst zu der Frage motiviert: Können immersive Systeme im alltäglichen Verkehrskontext, z.B. in Fahrzeugszenarien, nützlich werden? Wenn ja, wie sollten wir die MR-Technologie im Auto gestalten, um den Zugang und die Verbindung der Passagiere mit der physischen und der virtuellen Welt zu fördern und dabei Sicherheit, Komfort und Freude an der Fahrt zu gewährleisten? Zu diesem Zweck trägt diese Arbeit zu drei Aspekten bei: 1) Verständnis der Nutzung von MR im Auto durch die Passagiere - Zunächst wird ein Modell für die MR-Interaktion im Auto durch user research vorgestellt. Wie aus Interviews mit täglichen Pendlern hervorgeht, sind die Passagiere um ihre körperliche Unversehrtheit besorgt, wenn sie mit räumlichen Konflikten zwischen grenzenlosen virtuellen Umgebungen und dem begrenzten Kabinenraum konfrontiert werden. Das Modell soll Forschern dabei helfen, Informationen und Benutzerschnittstellen räumlich zu organisieren, die in der Nähe des Benutzers variieren. Darüber hinaus zeigt ein Feldexperiment kontextbezogenes Feedback zur Reisekrankheit bei der Nutzung immersiver Technologien auf der Straße. Dies hilft, das Modell zu verfeinern und die folgenden Experimente zu instruieren. 2) Vermischung von Realitäten bei Autofahrten - Zweitens wird in dieser Arbeit anhand einer Reihe von Prototypen und Experimenten untersucht, wie die MR-Technologie im Auto es den Passagieren ermöglichen kann, sich in virtuellen Umgebungen präsent zu fühlen und gleichzeitig das Bewusstsein für die reale Umgebung zu behalten. Die Ergebnisse zeigen technische Lösungen für räumliche Beschränkungen und Situationsbewusstsein, indem wesentliche Elemente der realen Umgebung in VR integriert werden. Die empirischen Erkenntnisse bringen eine Reihe von Dimensionen in das Modell der MR im Auto ein, die die Designentscheidungen für gemischte Realitäten leiten. 3) Über den Verkehrskontext hinaus - Drittens erweitere ich das Modell auf andere Alltagskontexte jenseits des Verkehrs, in denen räumliche und soziale Zwänge herrschen, wie z.B. in einem begrenzten und gemeinsam genutzten Wohnbereich zu Hause. Eine Literaturrecherche konsolidiert die Nutzung von Alltagsgegenständen als haptisches Feedback für MR-Interaktion über räumliche Skalen hinweg. Ein Laborexperiment zeigt, wie kontextbewusste MR-Systeme, die physische Konfigurationen berücksichtigen, soziale Interaktion mit anderen Personen in engen gemeinsamen Räumen ermöglichen. Diese Ergebnisse belegen die Übertragbarkeit des MR-Modells im Auto auf andere Kontexte. Schließlich schließe ich mit einem ganzheitlichen Modell für mobile MR-Interaktion in alltäglichen Kontexten, von zu Hause bis unterwegs. Mit meiner user research, meinen Prototypen und Evaluierungsexperimenten sowie meinem Modell ebnet diese Dissertation den Weg für das Verständnis der zukünftigen Nutzung immersiver Technologien durch Passagiere, für die Überwindung der heutigen technischen Beschränkungen von MR in der mobilen Interaktion und schließlich für die Förderung des allgegenwärtigen Zugangs und der engen Verbindung der mobilen Nutzer zu MR jederzeit und überall in ihrem täglichen Leben
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