56,087 research outputs found
Technology Solutions for Developmental Math: An Overview of Current and Emerging Practices
Reviews current practices in and strategies for incorporating innovative technology into the teaching of remedial math at the college level. Outlines challenges, emerging trends, and ways to combine technology with new concepts of instructional strategy
God\u27s Design and Phonemic Awareness: What is phonemic awareness, what is phonics, and what does God have to do with it?
Phonemic awareness is the foundation for a childâs literacy development. Godâs initial interaction with man after creation, through the spoken word, bestows authority on oral language. Manipulation of language begins in infancy and continues throughout oneâs life. Teachers need to understand what phonemic awareness entails in order to develop and assess a childâs development in this area
A survey of real-time crowd rendering
In this survey we review, classify and compare existing approaches for real-time crowd rendering. We first overview character animation techniques, as they are highly tied to crowd rendering performance, and then we analyze the state of the art in crowd rendering. We discuss different representations for level-of-detail (LoD) rendering of animated characters, including polygon-based, point-based, and image-based techniques, and review different criteria for runtime LoD selection. Besides LoD approaches, we review classic acceleration schemes, such as frustum culling and occlusion culling, and describe how they can be adapted to handle crowds of animated characters. We also discuss specific acceleration techniques for crowd rendering, such as primitive pseudo-instancing, palette skinning, and dynamic key-pose caching, which benefit from current graphics hardware. We also address other factors affecting performance and realism of crowds such as lighting, shadowing, clothing and variability. Finally we provide an exhaustive comparison of the most relevant approaches in the field.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
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deep|think: A Second Life environment for part-time research students at a distance
This paper reports on the design of a Second Life campus for a new innovative post-graduate research programme at the Open University, UK, a world leader in supported distance higher education. The programme, launched in October 2009, is a part- time Master of Philosophy (MPhil) to be delivered at a distance, supported by a blend of synchronous and asynchronous Internet technologies. This paper briefly discusses the pedagogical thinking behind the Second Life campus, and the way the implementation was designed to meet the pedagogy. The paper also reports on the outcome of an early evaluation we have conducted
Dynamic Facial Expression of Emotion Made Easy
Facial emotion expression for virtual characters is used in a wide variety of
areas. Often, the primary reason to use emotion expression is not to study
emotion expression generation per se, but to use emotion expression in an
application or research project. What is then needed is an easy to use and
flexible, but also validated mechanism to do so. In this report we present such
a mechanism. It enables developers to build virtual characters with dynamic
affective facial expressions. The mechanism is based on Facial Action Coding.
It is easy to implement, and code is available for download. To show the
validity of the expressions generated with the mechanism we tested the
recognition accuracy for 6 basic emotions (joy, anger, sadness, surprise,
disgust, fear) and 4 blend emotions (enthusiastic, furious, frustrated, and
evil). Additionally we investigated the effect of VC distance (z-coordinate),
the effect of the VC's face morphology (male vs. female), the effect of a
lateral versus a frontal presentation of the expression, and the effect of
intensity of the expression. Participants (n=19, Western and Asian subjects)
rated the intensity of each expression for each condition (within subject
setup) in a non forced choice manner. All of the basic emotions were uniquely
perceived as such. Further, the blends and confusion details of basic emotions
are compatible with findings in psychology
From conditioning to learning communities: Implications of fifty years of research in eâlearning interaction design
This paper will consider eâlearning in terms of the underlying learning processes and interactions that are stimulated, supported or favoured by new media and the contexts or communities in which it is used. We will review and critique a selection of research and development from the past fifty years that has linked pedagogical and learning theory to the design of innovative eâlearning systems and activities, and discuss their implications. It will include approaches that are, essentially, behaviourist (Skinner and GagnĂ©), cognitivist (Pask, Piaget and Papert), situated (Lave, Wenger and SeelyâBrown), socioâconstructivist (Vygotsky), socioâcultural (Nardi and Engestrom) and communityâbased (Wenger and Preece). Emerging from this review is the argument that effective eâlearning usually requires, or involves, highâquality educational discourse, that leads to, at the least, improved knowledge, and at the best, conceptual development and improved understanding. To achieve this I argue that we need to adopt a more holistic approach to design that synthesizes features of the included approaches, leading to a framework that emphasizes the relationships between cognitive changes, dialogue processes and the communities, or contexts for eâlearning
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