Learning more than Minecraft – a case from Jamaica

Can Minecraft teach digital skills? Anthea Edalere-Henderson looks at how games such as Minecraft can help educate parents about the new digital worlds of their children. Anthea teaches in the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication (CARIMAC) at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. Her work focuses on globalized forms of media technologies and media consumption, branding, children-as-audiences, and parental mediation of digital tools

The Neuro-Symbolic Concept Learner: Interpreting Scenes, Words, and Sentences From Natural Supervision

We propose the Neuro-Symbolic Concept Learner (NS-CL), a model that learns visual concepts, words, and semantic parsing of sentences without explicit supervision on any of them; instead, our model learns by simply looking at images and reading paired questions and answers. Our model builds an object-based scene representation and translates sentences into executable, symbolic programs. To bridge the learning of two modules, we use a neuro-symbolic reasoning module that executes these programs on the latent scene representation. Analogical to human concept learning, the perception module learns visual concepts based on the language description of the object being referred to. Meanwhile, the learned visual concepts facilitate learning new words and parsing new sentences. We use curriculum learning to guide the searching over the large compositional space of images and language. Extensive experiments demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our model on learning visual concepts, word representations, and semantic parsing of sentences. Further, our method allows easy generalization to new object attributes, compositions, language concepts, scenes and questions, and even new program domains. It also empowers applications including visual question answering and bidirectional image-text retrieval.Comment: ICLR 2019 (Oral). Project page: http://nscl.csail.mit.edu

Parenting in Babylon – a Minecraft digital backyard in Australia

Michael Dezuanni and Anna Whateley tell us about their own home, technology in family life and the role of Minecraft in teaching digital skills across generations. They both work at Queensland University of Technology, Michael is Deputy Director of the Children and Youth Research Centre, Anna teaches adolescent fiction and the sociology of education

Learning resilience online through Minecraft

Children learn through experience and feedback. Paulina Haduong explores how we can support young people in learning how to productively engage in dialogue and operate as courteous digital citizens. She looks at one particular online community, Connected Camps, that offers a more positive experience for young people and takes into account users’ youth and desire to learn. Paulina is a PhD student at Harvard Graduate School of Education and an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Her work explores the intersections of youth, education, and technology

Automatic mental processes, automatic actions and behaviours in game transfer phenomena: an empirical self-report study using online forum data

Previous studies have demonstrated that the playing of videogames can have both intended and unintended effects. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of videogames on players’ mental processes and behaviours in day-to-day settings. A total of 1,023 self-reports from 762 gamers collected from online videogame forums were classified, quantified, described and explained. The data include automatic thoughts, sensations and impulses, automatic mental replays of the game in real life, and voluntary/involuntary behaviours with videogame content. Many gamers reported that they had responded – at least sometimes – to real life stimuli as if they were still playing videogames. This included overreactions, avoidances, and involuntary movements of limbs. These experiences lasted relatively short periods of time but in a minority of players were recurrent. The gamers' experiences appeared to be enhanced by virtual embodiment, repetitive manipulation of game controls, and their gaming habits. However, similar phenomena may also occur when doing other non-gaming activities. The implications of these game transfer experiences are discussed