An educational experiment with a group of Negro preschool children

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Kansas, Home Economics, 1929

Interactive Digital Narratives. Counter-Hegemonic Narratives and Expression of Identity

INTERACTIVE DIGITAL NARRATIVES Counter-Hegemonic Narratives and Expression of Identit

Designing Mixed-Initiative Video Games

The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables humans to co-create content with machines. The unexpectedness of AI-generated content can bring inspiration and entertainment to users. However, the co-creation interactions are always designed for content creators and have poor accessibility. To explore gamification of mixed-initiative co-creation and make human-AI interactions accessible and fun for players, I prototyped Snake Story, a mixed-initiative game where players can select AI-generated texts to write a story of a snake by playing a "Snake" like game. A controlled experiment was conducted to investigate the dynamics of player-AI interactions with and without the game component in the designed interface. As a result of a study with 11 players (n=11), I found that players utilized different strategies when playing with the two versions, game mechanics significantly affected the output stories, players' creative process, as well as role perceptions, and players with different backgrounds showed different preferences for the two versions. Based on these results, I further discussed considerations for mixed-initiative game design. This work aims to inspire the design of engaging co-creation experiences

A master list of reading materials for enriching courses in mathematics.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Stories within Immersive Virtual Environments

[eng] How can we use immersive and interactive technologies to portray stories?How can we take advantage of the fact that within immersive virtual en-vironments people tend to respond realistically to virtual situations andevents to develop narrative content? Stories in such a media would allowthe participant to contribute to the story and interact with the virtualcharacters while the narrative plot would not change, or change only upto how it was decided a priori. Participants in such a narrative would beable to freely interact within the virtual environments and yet still beaware of the main trust of the stories presented. How can we preserve the‘respond as if it is real’ phenomenon induced by these technologies, butalso develop an unfolding plot in this environment? In other words, canwe develop a story, conserving the structure, its psychological and cul-tural richness and the emotional and cognitive involvement it supposes,in an interactive and immersive audiovisual space?In recent years Virtual Reality therapy has shown that an Immersive Vir-tual Environment (IVE) with a predetermined plot can be experienced asan interactive narrative. For example, in the context of Post TraumaticStress Disorder treatment, the reactions of the participants and the thera-peutic impact suggest that an IVE is a qualitatively different experiencethan classical audiovisual content. However, the methods to develop suchkind of content are not systematic, and the consistency of the experienceis only granted by a therapist or operator controlling in real time theunfolding narrative. Can a story with a strong classical plot be renderedin an automated and interactive immersive virtual environment?..[cat] Podem emprar la realitat virtual immersiva per contar històries? Com po-dem aprofitar el fet que dins dels entorns virtuals immersius les personestendeixen a respondre de manera realista a les situacions i esdevenimentsvirtuals per desenvolupar històries? Els participants en aquest tipus denarrativa podrien interactuar lliurement amb els entorns virtuals i noobstant això experimentarien les històries presentades com a plausibles iconsistents. Una història en aquest medi audiovisual permetria als parti-cipants interactuar amb els personatges virtuals i contribuir activamentals esdeveniments escenificats en l’entorn virtual. Malgrat això, la tramaestablerta a priori no canviaria, o canviaria només dins els marges es-tablerts per l’autor. Com podem preservar el fet que hom tendeix a "re-spondre com si fos real" induït per aquestes tecnologies mentre desenvolu-pem una trama en aquests entorns? En altres paraules, podem desenvolu-par una història conservant-ne l’estructura, la riquesa cultural i psicolò-gica i la implicació emocional i cognitiva que suposa, en una realitatvirtual immersiva i interactiva?Recentment la teràpia de realitat virtual ha mostrat que un entorn vir-tual amb un guió preestablert pot ser percebut com una narració inter-activa. Per exemple, en el context del tractament de Trastorns per EstrèsPostraumàtic, les reaccions i impactes terapèutics suggereixen que pro-voca una sensació de realitat que en fa una experiència qualitativamentdiferent als continguts audiovisuals clàssics. No obstant això, la consistèn-cia de l’experiència tan sols pot ser garantida si un un terapeuta o op-erador controla en temps real el flux dels esdeveniments constituint elguió narratiu. Podem representar un guió clàssic en un entorn virtualautomatitzat?..

Virtual Worlds as Comparative Law

What would happen if we took seriously the claims of virtual worlds to be genuinely new places? Societies have laws, so why should virtual societies be any different? My topic, then, will not be the law of virtual worlds, but rather law in virtual worlds. If lawyers can learn from studying the legal systems of common law and civil law countries, perhaps we can also learn from studying the legal systems of virtual worlds. In some cases, these legal systems track our own surprisingly well. In other cases, the contrasts are striking. Both the similarities and differences between real-life law and virtual law are instructive. They can teach us something about what is really going on in virtual worlds, and they can teach us something about what is really going on in our own world. This Article is therefore a thought experiment; an attempt to lay the necessary conceptual foundations for talking coherently about “in-game” law. I will identify four recurring problems in virtual worlds, and discuss what we might gain by thinking about these problems as legal ones. Part II of this Article will discuss virtual property, which has been one of the most spectacularly successful features of massively multiplayer games. Studying the mechanics and meaning of “ownership” within games has the potential to tell us a great deal about the mechanics and meaning of law in virtual worlds more generally. Part III will discuss the forms of investment and exchange governed by contract law in the real world. Virtual economies seem to be humming along without extensive bodies of contract law. Explaining this absence provides us a useful framework for thinking about wealth and society and how these concepts do or do not change as they go online. Part IV explores the social dynamics of groups of players, specifically, how they prevent undesired conduct by others and how they band together for common purposes. Here, the challenge is to find good analogies to similar problems of real-life law. Finally, Part V turns to one of the most discussed problems in game design: How do we reassure players that designers’ overwhelming powers over game spaces will not be used maliciously? If we look at the corresponding problem from real-life law — how to restrain seemingly unrestrainable sovereign powers — we see that law has a good deal to say about the practical techniques by which a lasting and trusting relationship between seeming unequals can be established

The People Inside

Our collection begins with an example of computer vision that cuts through time and bureaucratic opacity to help us meet real people from the past. Buried in thousands of files in the National Archives of Australia is evidence of the exclusionary “White Australia” policies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which were intended to limit and discourage immigration by non-Europeans. Tim Sherratt and Kate Bagnall decided to see what would happen if they used a form of face-detection software made ubiquitous by modern surveillance systems and applied it to a security system of a century ago. What we get is a new way to see the government documents, not as a source of statistics but, Sherratt and Bagnall argue, as powerful evidence of the people affected by racism