The role of element type and crossed relation in restructuring difficulty

Chunk decomposition is an aspect of problem solving that involves decomposing a pattern into its component parts in order to regroup them into a new pattern. Previous work suggests that the primary source of difficulty in chunk decomposition is whether a problem’s solution requires removing a part that is a meaningful perceptual pattern (termed a chunk) or not (a non-chunk). However, the role of spatial overlap (crossed relation or not) has been ignored in this line of research. Here, we dissociated the role of element type and crossed relation in chunk decomposition problems by employing a Chinese character transformation task. We replicated the finding that when the to-be-removed element is a non-chunk, the problem is more difficult to solve than when the element is a chunk. However, this result held only if the elements had no crossed relation. Relative to non-crossed relation, problems that involved removing elements that overlapped with the remaining character were more difficult to solve irrespective of the element type. We conclude that both element type and crossed relation can cause the difficulty of chunk decomposition and crossed relation plays more important role in preventing people from finding insightful ways to decompose chunk relative to element type

Sustaining motivation for Japanese kanji learning: Can digital games help?

Made available with permission from the publisher.Educational digital games are often presented at Technology in Language Education conferences. The games are entertaining and are backed by research detailing how games can improve the learning experience through active critical learning, learner interaction, competition, challenge, and high learner motivation. The authors, inspired by such presentations, were interested in creating digital games to mitigate problems of demotivation in a beginner Japanese kanji (non-alphabetic script) class at Auckland University of Technology but found there was no body of research on digi-tal games for learning non-alphabetic scripts. This paper contributes to filling this gap by describing the creation of three digital games for kanji learning. Difficulties were experienced during the development of the games and these are described with reference to the divide, discussed in gaming literature, between the type of digital games being showcased at conferences and the reality for teachers wishing to emulate the practice by developing their own digital games. Questionnaire responses and the game-related journal entries of three cohorts of learners were analysed, and teacher reflections on the action research project were used to answer the questions “Should we be leaving this field to the experts?” and “Other than high-end multi-level curriculum-centred digital games, are there different gaming scenarios worth exploring?

Guide to developing digital games for early grade literacy for developing countries

This guide works to assist game developers, literacy experts, and the staff of agencies interested in funding the development of digital games for early grade literacy learning. It presents information to be considered when designing games for literacy learning, and uses game examples that demonstrate how game developers and literacy educators have worked together. The guide has eight sections that address early grade reading and learning design considerations; design considerations for games development and learning; areas for research and development; case studies and supplemental resources

Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Online Handwriting Text Classification

Self-supervised learning offers an efficient way of extracting rich representations from various types of unlabeled data while avoiding the cost of annotating large-scale datasets. This is achievable by designing a pretext task to form pseudo labels with respect to the modality and domain of the data. Given the evolving applications of online handwritten texts, in this study, we propose the novel Part of Stroke Masking (POSM) as a pretext task for pretraining models to extract informative representations from the online handwriting of individuals in English and Chinese languages, along with two suggested pipelines for fine-tuning the pretrained models. To evaluate the quality of the extracted representations, we use both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation methods. The pretrained models are fine-tuned to achieve state-of-the-art results in tasks such as writer identification, gender classification, and handedness classification, also highlighting the superiority of utilizing the pretrained models over the models trained from scratch

An on-line handwritten Chinese input system using a "unique character mapping" algorithm.

by Chan Shing Chi, Michael.Thesis (M.Ph.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1987.Bibliography: leaves [112]-[114

Art-integrated pedagogy for English and Chinese language learners

The purpose of this research is to identify how art-integrated teaching methodology might help learners to absorb contents more effectively than the traditional teaching methodology. There are many schools in the U.S. started to use art-integration multimodal approach in school curriculum on different academic subjects. This research focuses on the art-integrated pedagogy in linguistic language, especially for English language learners and Chinese language learners. The researcher approaches the subject with illustrating a collection of personal cases about art-integrated pedagogy used in teaching and learning environment. This art-based research produces two teaching materials designed to answer the questions that were frequently asked in the researcher’s teaching and learning experiences, and they are the products of the process of finding the solutions. This research is hope to encourage language teachers to design their own art-integrated teaching materials