Underdogs and superheroes: Designing for new players in public space

We are exploring methods for participatory and public involvement of new 'players' in the design space. Underdogs & Superheroes involves a game-based methodology – a series of creative activities or games – in order to engage people experientially, creatively, and personally throughout the design process. We have found that games help engage users’ imaginations by representing reality without limiting expectations to what's possible here and now; engaging experiential and personal perspectives (the 'whole' person); and opening the creative process to hands-on user participation through low/no-tech materials and a widely-understood approach. The methods are currently being applied in the project Underdogs & Superheroes, which aims to evolve technological interventions for personal and community presence in local public spaces

Health literacy practices in social virtual worlds and the influence on health behaviour

This study explored how health information accessed via a 3D social virtual world and the representation of ‘self’ through the use of an avatar impact physical world health behaviour. In-depth interviews were conducted in a sample of 25 people, across 10 countries, who accessed health information in a virtual world (VW): 12 females and 13 males. Interviews were audio-recorded via private in-world voice chat or via private instant message. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. The social skills and practices evidenced demonstrate how the collective knowledge and skills of communities in VWs can influence improvements in individual and community health literacy through a distributed model. The findings offer support for moving away from the idea of health literacy as a set of skills which reside within an individual to a sociocultural model of health literacy. Social VWs can offer a place where people can access health information in multiple formats through the use of an avatar, which can influence changes in behaviour in the physical world and the VW. This can lead to an improvement in social skills and health literacy practices and represents a social model of health literacy

Engineering affect: emotion regulation, the internet, and the techno-social niche

Philosophical work exploring the relation between cognition and the Internet is now an active area of research. Some adopt an externalist framework, arguing that the Internet should be seen as environmental scaffolding that drives and shapes cognition. However, despite growing interest in this topic, little attention has been paid to how the Internet influences our affective life — our moods, emotions, and our ability to regulate these and other feeling states. We argue that the Internet scaffolds not only cognition but also affect. Using various case studies, we consider some ways that we are increasingly dependent on our Internet-enabled “techno-social niches” to regulate the contours of our own affective life and participate in the affective lives of others. We argue further that, unlike many of the other environmental resources we use to regulate affect, the Internet has distinct properties that introduce new dimensions of complexity to these regulative processes. First, it is radically social in a way many of these other resources are not. Second, it is a radically distributed and decentralized resource; no one individual or agent is responsible for the Internet’s content or its affective impact on users. Accordingly, while the Internet can profoundly augment and enrich our affective life and deepen our connection with others, there is also a distinctive kind of affective precarity built into our online endeavors as well

Collectively Incentive Compatible Tax Systems

This paper assumes that individuals possess private information both about their abilities and about their valuation of a public good. Individuals can undertake collective actions on order to manipulate the tax system and the decision on public good provision. Consequently, an implementable scheme of taxation has to be collectively incentive compatible. If preferences are additively separable, then an implementable tax systems has the following properties: (i) tax payments do not depend on public goods preferences and (ii) there is no scope for a collective manipulation of public goods preferences. For a quasilinear economy, the optimal tax system is explicitly characterized.Optimal Taxation, Public Good Provision, Revelation of Preferences, Information Aggregation

Persuasive design of a mobile energy conservation game with direct feedback and social cues

Pervasive gaming has the potential of transforming the home into a persuasive environment in which the user can learn about appliances and their electricity consumption. Power Explorer is a mobile game with a special sensing approach that provides real-time electricity measurements and feedback when the user switches on and off devices in the home. The game was developed based on persuasive principles to provide an engaging means to learn about energy with positive and negative feedback and social feedback from peers on real energy actions in the home. We present the design and rationale of this game and discuss how pervasive games can be viewed from a persuasive and learning point of view

What would learning in an open world look like? A vision for the future

The pace of current technological advancement is phenomenal. In the last few years we have seen the emergence of ever more sophisticated gaming technologies, rich, immersive virtual worlds and new social networking services that enable learners and teachers to connect and communicate in new ways. The pace of change looks set to continue as annual Horizon reports testify (http://www.nmc.org/horizon). Clearly new technologies offer much in an educational context, with the promise of flexible, personalised and student-centred learning. Indeed research over the past few years, looking at learners' use of technologies, has given us a rich picture of how learners of all ages are appropriating new tools within their own context, mixing different applications for finding/managing information and for communicating with others (Sharpe and Beetham, forthcoming)

Leading Undergraduate Students to Big Data Generation

People are facing a flood of data today. Data are being collected at unprecedented scale in many areas, such as networking, image processing, virtualization, scientific computation, and algorithms. The huge data nowadays are called Big Data. Big data is an all encompassing term for any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process them using traditional data processing applications. In this article, the authors present a unique way which uses network simulator and tools of image processing to train students abilities to learn, analyze, manipulate, and apply Big Data. Thus they develop students handson abilities on Big Data and their critical thinking abilities. The authors used novel image based rendering algorithm with user intervention to generate realistic 3D virtual world. The learning outcomes are significant

Using an interactive whiteboard and a computer-programming tool to support the development of the key competencies in the New Zealand curriculum

Does children’s use of the software Scratch provide potential for the enhancement of key competencies as they work in pairs at the interactive whiteboard (IWB)? This article looks at how children using Scratch collaborated and managed their projects as they set about designing, constructing, testing and evaluating a game for others to play, a task that provided a sustained challenge over six weeks and beyond. The findings showed that the key competencies of participating, contributing, and relating to others were enhanced by the collaborative use of Scratch at the IWB, and that creative and conceptual thinking processes were sustained. Children became increasingly adept at using Scratch, and some children, previously thought to have poor social skills, began to articulate their understandings to others. While a guiding and scaffolding role was evident in teachers’ actions, close monitoring of group progress and direct input from teachers is required to keep the challenge high but achievable, and to extend children’s knowledge and thinking as they use Scratch at the IWB

Learning and Games

Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning In this chapter, I argue that good video games recruit good learning and that a game's design is inherently connected to designing good learning for players. I start with a perspective on learning now common in the Learning Sciences that argues that people primarily think and learn through experiences they have had, not through abstract calculations and generalizations. People store these experiences in memory -- and human long-term memory is now viewed as nearly limitless -- and use them to run simulations in their minds to prepare for problem solving in new situations. These simulations help them to form hypotheses about how to proceed in the new situation based on past experiences. The chapter also discusses the conditions experience must meet if it is to be optimal for learning and shows how good video games can deliver such optimal learning experiences. Some of the issues covered include: identity and learning; models and model-based thinking; the control of avatars and "empathy for a complex system"; distributed intelligence and cross-functional teams for learning; motivation, and ownership; emotion in learning; and situated meaning, that is, the ways in which games represent verbal meaning through images, actions, and dialogue, not just other words and definitions