The virtual playground: an educational virtual reality environment for evaluating interactivity and conceptual learning

The research presented in this paper aims at investigating user interaction in immersive virtual learning environments (VLEs), focusing on the role and the effect of interactivity on conceptual learning. The goal has been to examine if the learning of young users improves through interacting in (i.e. exploring, reacting to, and acting upon) an immersive virtual environment (VE) compared to non interactive or non-immersive environments. Empirical work was carried out with more than 55 primary school students between the ages of 8 and 12, in different between-group experiments: an exploratory study, a pilot study, and a large-scale experiment. The latter was conducted in a virtual environment designed to simulate a playground. In this ‘Virtual Playground’, each participant was asked to complete a set of tasks designed to address arithmetical ‘fractions’ problems. Three different conditions, two experimental virtual reality (VR) conditions and a non-VR condition, that varied the levels of activity and interactivity, were designed to evaluate how children accomplish the various tasks. Pre-tests, post-tests, interviews, video, audio, and log files were collected for each participant, and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. This paper presents a selection of case studies extracted from the qualitative analysis, which illustrate the variety of approaches taken by children in the VEs in response to visual cues and system feedback. Results suggest that the fully interactive VE aided children in problem solving but did not provide as strong evidence of conceptual change as expected; rather, it was the passive VR environment, where activity was guided by a virtual robot, that seemed to support student reflection and recall, leading to indications of conceptual change

The social geography of childcare: 'making up' the middle class child

Childcare is a condensate of disparate social forces and social processes. It is gendered and classed. It is subject to an excess of policy and political discourse. It is increasingly a focus for commercial exploitation. This is a paper reporting on work in progress in an ESRC funded research project (R000239232) on the choice and provision of pre-school childcare by middle class (service class) families in two contrasting London locations. Drawing on recent work in class analysis the paper examines the relationships between childcare choice, middle class fractions and locality. It suggests that on the evidence of the findings to date, there is some evidence of systematic differences between fractions in terms of values, perspectives and preferences for childcare, but a more powerful case for intra-class similarities, particularly when it comes to putting preferences into practice in the 'making up of a middle class child' through care and education

Role of Galaxy Mergers in Cosmic Star Formation History

We present a morphology study of intermediate-redshift (0.2<z<1.2) luminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs) and general field galaxies in the GOODS fields using a revised asymmetry measurement method optimized for deep fields. By taking careful account of the importance of the underlying sky-background structures, our new method does not suffer from systematic bias and offers small uncertainties. By redshifting local LIRGs and low-redshift GOODS galaxies to different higher redshifts, we have found that the redshift dependence of the galaxy asymmetry due to surface-brightness dimming is a function of the asymmetry itself, with larger corrections for more asymmetric objects. By applying redshift-, IR-luminosity- and optical-brightness-dependent asymmetry corrections, we have found that intermediate-redshift LIRGs generally show highly asymmetric morphologies, with implied merger fractions ~50% up to z=1.2, although they are slightly more symmetric than local LIRGs. For general field galaxies, we find an almost constant relatively high merger fraction (20-30%). The B-band LFs of galaxy mergers are derived at different redshifts up to z=1.2 and confirm the weak evolution of the merger fraction after breaking the luminosity-density degeneracy. The IR luminosity functions (LFs) of galaxy mergers are also derived, indicating a larger merger fraction at higher IR luminosity. The integral of the merger IR LFs indicates a dramatic evolution of the merger-induced IR energy density [(1+z)^(5-6)}], and that galaxy mergers start to dominate the cosmic IR energy density at z>~1.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ, 25 pages, 23 figures (2 colors). The high-resolution pdf is at http://cztsy.as.arizona.edu/~yong/Research/SHI_MERGER.pd

A comparative study of the basic skills and understandings included in Winston arithmetic series and the school mathematics study group program in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit