The Role of Practice in Chess: A Longitudinal Study

We investigated the role of practice in the acquisition of chess expertise by submitting a questionnaire to 104 players of different skill levels. Players had to report their chess rating, the number of hours of individual and group practice, their use of different learning resources and activities, and whether they had been trained by a coach. The use of archival data enabled us to track the rating of some of the players throughout their career. We found that there was a strong correlation between chess skill and number of hours of practice. Moreover, group practice was a better predictor of high-level performance than individual practice. We also found that masters had a higher chess rating than expert players after only three years of serious dedication to chess, although there were no differences in the number of hours of practice. The difference that may explain the variation in rating is that masters start practising at an earlier age than experts. Finally, we found that activities such as reading books and using computer software (game databases, but not playing programs) were important for the development of high-level performance. Together with previous data and theories of expert performance, our results indicate limits in the deliberate practice framework and make suggestions on how best to carry out learning in chess and in other fields

Heuristic Evaluation for Serious Immersive Games and M-instruction

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. Two fast growing areas for technology-enhanced learning are serious games and mobile instruction (M-instruction or M-Learning). Serious games are ones that are meant to be more than just entertainment. They have a serious use to educate or promote other types of activity. Immersive Games frequently involve many players interacting in a shared rich and complex-perhaps web-based-mixed reality world, where their circumstances will be multi and varied. Their reality may be augmented and often self-composed, as in a user-defined avatar in a virtual world. M-instruction and M-Learning is learning on the move; much of modern computer use is via smart devices, pads, and laptops. People use these devices all over the place and thus it is a natural extension to want to use these devices where they are to learn. This presents a problem if we wish to evaluate the effectiveness of the pedagogic media they are using. We have no way of knowing their situation, circumstance, education background and motivation, or potentially of the customisation of the final software they are using. Getting to the end user itself may also be problematic; these are learning environments that people will dip into at opportune moments. If access to the end user is hard because of location and user self-personalisation, then one solution is to look at the software before it goes out. Heuristic Evaluation allows us to get User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) experts to reflect on the software before it is deployed. The effective use of heuristic evaluation with pedagogical software [1] is extended here, with existing Heuristics Evaluation Methods that make the technique applicable to Serious Immersive Games and mobile instruction (M-instruction). We also consider how existing Heuristic Methods may be adopted. The result represents a new way of making this methodology applicable to this new developing area of learning technology

Serious interface design for dental health: Wiimote-based tangible interaction for school children

This paper describes a camera-based approach towards creating a tangible interface for serious games. We introduce our game for dental health targeted at school children which implements the Nintendo WiiMote as infrared camera. Paired with a gesture-recognition system, this combination allows us to apply real-world items as input devices. Thereby, the game tries to address different aspects of dental hygiene along with the improvement of children's motor skills. In our focus group test, we found that tangible interfaces offer great potential for educational purposes and can be used to engage kids in a playful learning process by addressing their childlike curiosity and fostering implicit learning

Using virtual worlds for online role-play

The paper explores the use of virtual worlds to support online role-play as a collaborative activity. This paper describes some of the challenges involved in building online role-play environments in a virtual world and presents some of the ideas being explored by the project in the role-play applications being developed. Finally we explore how this can be used within the context of immersive education and 3D collaborative environments

Designing a serious game for community-based disease prevention in the Amazon

Many developing regions around the world rely on community-based healthcare strategies and practices to deal with prevention and control of often neglected diseases, by educating the local population and healthcare professionals, on the mechanisms by which such diseases spread and how they can be controlled. In this paper we describe a multiplayer serious game designed to raise awareness, and foster adoption of preventive measures among local citizens and community-health professionals about Leishmaniosis. We also discuss how the underlying concept for this game and its mechanics have been iteratively designed and developed in collaboration with a group of people with relevant medical and research expertise as well as practical knowledge resulting from working with our target population