Using interactive storytelling approach in science education

This research was aimed to develop interactive multimedia software and to determine its competencies. This Computer Aided Learning (CAL) was established based on National Pre-School Curriculum, 2006, Education Ministry of Malaysia. This Computer Aided Learning (CAL) focused on Science subject with the theme of "Explore the Space" for pre-school level. The development of educational multimedia software with animated story approach making the learning process more fun as well as enable teachers to convey knowledge in easier way. Furthermore, this study refers to the learning theories, for instance, behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism as well as scaffolding. This software package was developed using ADDIE methodology and Adobe Director 11 software as the base. The interactive animated story approach used in the exploration module includes stories of 9 planets in the solar system; Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Early analysis was done in 10 preschools managed by the Education Ministry of Malaysia. From the analysis, it was found that the current Science teaching is teacher-oriented. This contributes to the development of the children with criterion such as passive, lack of confidence to speak and depend solely on their teachers

What Values in Design? The Challenge of Incorporating Moral Values into Design

Recently, there is increased attention to the integration of moral values into the conception, design, and development of emerging IT. The most reviewed approach for this purpose in ethics and technology so far is Value-Sensitive Design (VSD). This article considers VSD as the prime candidate for implementing normative considerations into design. Its methodology is considered from a conceptual, analytical, normative perspective. The focus here is on the suitability of VSD for integrating moral values into the design of technologies in a way that joins in with an analytical perspective on ethics of technology. Despite its promising character, it turns out that VSD falls short in several respects: (1) VSD does not have a clear methodology for identifying stakeholders, (2) the integration of empirical methods with conceptual research within the methodology of VSD is obscure, (3) VSD runs the risk of committing the naturalistic fallacy when using empirical knowledge for implementing values in design, (4) the concept of values, as well as their realization, is left undetermined and (5) VSD lacks a complimentary or explicit ethical theory for dealing with value trade-offs. For the normative evaluation of a technology, I claim that an explicit and justified ethical starting point or principle is required. Moreover, explicit attention should be given to the value aims and assumptions of a particular design. The criteria of adequacy for such an approach or methodology follow from the evaluation of VSD as the prime candidate for implementing moral values in design

AI literacy in K‑12: a systematic literature review

The successful irruption of AI-based technology in our daily lives has led to a growing educational, social, and political interest in training citizens in AI. Education systems now need to train students at the K-12 level to live in a society where they must interact with AI. Thus, AI literacy is a pedagogical and cognitive challenge at the K-12 level. This study aimed to understand how AI is being integrated into K-12 education worldwide. We conducted a search process following the systematic literature review method using Scopus. 179 documents were reviewed, and two broad groups of AI literacy approaches were identified, namely learning experience and theoretical perspective. The first group covered experiences in learning technical, conceptual and applied skills in a particular domain of interest. The second group revealed that significant efforts are being made to design models that frame AI literacy proposals. There were hardly any experiences that assessed whether students understood AI concepts after the learning experience. Little attention has been paid to the undesirable consequences of an indiscriminate and insufficiently thought-out application of AI. A competency framework is required to guide the didactic proposals designed by educational institutions and define a curriculum reflecting the sequence and academic continuity, which should be modular, personalized and adjusted to the conditions of the schools. Finally, AI literacy can be leveraged to enhance the learning of disciplinary core subjects by integrating AI into the teaching process of those subjects, provided the curriculum is co-designed with teachersThis work has partially been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (PID2021-123152OB-C21), and the Consellería de Educación, Universidade e Formación Profesional (accreditation 2019–2022 ED431C2022/19 and reference competitive group, ED431G2019/04) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), which acknowledges the CiTIUS— Centro Singular de Investigación en Tecnoloxías Intelixentes da Universidade de Santiago de Compostela as a Research Center of the Galician University System. This work also received support from the Educational Knowledge Transfer (EKT), the Erasmus + project (reference number 612414-EPP-1-2019-1- ES-EPPKA2-KA) and the Knowledge Alliances call (Call EAC/A03/2018)S

New Design Methods for Activist Gaming

Significant work in the IT, philosophy, and communications communities has focused on designing systems that support human values, but this work has not yet been widely applied to game design. Designers and engineers have become increasingly aware of ways in which the artifacts they create can embody political, social, and ethical values, but there are few practical methodologies for a game designer to draw from when producing games which systematically incorporate values in the design process. Not unexpectedly, many game designers struggle to find a balance between their own values, those of users and other stakeholders, and those of the surrounding culture. In this paper, we present the RAPUNSEL project as a prime example and case study of design in a values-rich context and describe our efforts toward navigating the complexities this entails. In RAPUNSEL, a three-year, NSF-funded project, a team of computer scientists, interaction designers, and social psychologists were tasked with the collaborative creation of a networked game environment to teach programming to middle-school girls. Although it is a large project with multiple interlinked components (e.g. engineering, pedagogy, interface, graphics, networking, etc.), challenging questions about values emerged in several key phases. It was therefore, essential to the quality of the project as a whole to iteratively address questions concerning values and to systematically implement our answers in the design. Drawing on a number of existing approaches and analytic frameworks we demonstrate the range of values that we considered over the project’s lifecycle. We present initial steps toward the development of a systematic methodology for discovery, analysis, and integration of values in technology design in the hope that others may both benefit from and build upon this work. Additionally we present a means for dynamically categorizing values and present specific examples of values tradeoffs we encountered in the game design process and their subsequent resolutions

Online computer vision toolkit

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2011.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 60-64).In this thesis, we present an online toolkit, based on a combination of a Scratch-based programming environment and computer vision libraries, manifested as blocks within the environment, integrated with a community platform for diffusing advances in computer vision to a general populace. We show that by providing these tools, non-developers are able to create and publish computer vision applications. The visual development environment includes a collection of algorithms that, despite being well known in the computer vision community, provide capabilities to commodity cameras that are not yet common knowledge. In support of this visual development environment, we also present an online community that allows users to share applications made in the environment, assisting the dissemination of both the knowledge of camera capabilities and advanced camera capabilities to users who have not yet been exposed to their existence or comfortable with their use. Initial evaluations consist of user studies that quantify the abilities afforded to the novice computer vision users by the toolkit, baselined against experienced computer vision users.by Kevin Chiu.S.M

Critical Programming: Toward a Philosophy of Computing

Beliefs about the relationship between human beings and computing machines and their destinies have alternated from heroic counterparts to conspirators of automated genocide, from apocalyptic extinction events to evolutionary cyborg convergences. Many fear that people are losing key intellectual and social abilities as tasks are offloaded to the everywhere of the built environment, which is developing a mind of its own. If digital technologies have contributed to forming a dumbest generation and ushering in a robotic moment, we all have a stake in addressing this collective intelligence problem. While digital humanities continue to flourish and introduce new uses for computer technologies, the basic modes of philosophical inquiry remain in the grip of print media, and default philosophies of computing prevail, or experimental ones propagate false hopes. I cast this as-is situation as the post-postmodern network dividual cyborg, recognizing that the rational enlightenment of modernism and regressive subjectivity of postmodernism now operate in an empire of extended mind cybernetics combined with techno-capitalist networks forming societies of control. Recent critical theorists identify a justificatory scheme foregrounding participation in projects, valorizing social network linkages over heroic individualism, and commending flexibility and adaptability through life long learning over stable career paths. It seems to reify one possible, contingent configuration of global capitalism as if it was the reflection of a deterministic evolution of commingled technogenesis and synaptogenesis. To counter this trend I offer a theoretical framework to focus on the phenomenology of software and code, joining social critiques with textuality and media studies, the former proposing that theory be done through practice, and the latter seeking to understand their schematism of perceptibility by taking into account engineering techniques like time axis manipulation. The social construction of technology makes additional theoretical contributions dispelling closed world, deterministic historical narratives and requiring voices be given to the engineers and technologists that best know their subject area. This theoretical slate has been recently deployed to produce rich histories of computing, networking, and software, inform the nascent disciplines of software studies and code studies, as well as guide ethnographers of software development communities. I call my syncretism of these approaches the procedural rhetoric of diachrony in synchrony, recognizing that multiple explanatory layers operating in their individual temporal and physical orders of magnitude simultaneously undergird post-postmodern network phenomena. Its touchstone is that the human-machine situation is best contemplated by doing, which as a methodology for digital humanities research I call critical programming. Philosophers of computing explore working code places by designing, coding, and executing complex software projects as an integral part of their intellectual activity, reflecting on how developing theoretical understanding necessitates iterative development of code as it does other texts, and how resolving coding dilemmas may clarify or modify provisional theories as our minds struggle to intuit the alien temporalities of machine processes

Towards Affinity Spaces in Schools: Supporting Video Game-Design Partnerships as Twenty-First Century Learning Tools

Abstract Towards affinity spaces in schools: Supporting video game-design partnerships as twenty-first century learning tools Renee E. Jackson, Ph.D. Concordia University, 2016 The Arcade Our Way (AoW) project was an intergenerational, all female, video game design based project involving fifteen grade seven students, five undergraduate students, the CEO of a small gaming company and the researcher who both participated and observed. This ethnographic pilot study was an investigation of the merits of the project as a twenty-first century learning tool, where twenty-first century learning is aligned with the views of John Dewey and Paulo Freire. The project is considered for its strength as a progressive learning space through the lens of contemporary informal online learning spaces knowns as affinity spaces (Gee, 2005), and “energizing moments” a tool developed through data analysis. Affinity spaces are nonhierarchical and constructivist in nature, and participants of all ages learn from one another based on shared interests. Specifically the fourteen features of nurturing affinity spaces (Gee & Hayes, 2012) were used as reflective tools through which to consider the strength of the project as a constructivist learning environment. Each feature was then evaluated through a five point rubric and ranked according to its relative strength. To further corroborate the merit of the project from a student centred perspective, “energizing moments” provided indicators of the moments when the participants were most highly engaged by the work. This is another approach to attending to the strength of this project, and perhaps other projects as well, based on the idea that student motivation matters. Identifying energizing moments throughout the project can not only provide further insight into the strength of the project from a student-centred perspective, but can support strategies for enabling future such motivation. These tools were used to derive recommendations towards future iterations of the project. This research comes from the perspective that twenty-first century learning strategies have much to learn about pedagogy from the ways young people are motivated within the context of specific projects, and from their informal learning choices outside of school through technology and the internet. Keywords: video games, gender, new-media literacy, collaboration, progressive education, traditional education, twenty-first century learning, real-world learning, experiential learning, partnerships

Towards Affinity Spaces in Schools: Supporting Video Game-Design Partnerships as Twenty-First Century Learning Tools

Abstract Towards affinity spaces in schools: Supporting video game-design partnerships as twenty-first century learning tools Renee E. Jackson, Ph.D. Concordia University, 2016 The Arcade Our Way (AoW) project was an intergenerational, all female, video game design based project involving fifteen grade seven students, five undergraduate students, the CEO of a small gaming company and the researcher who both participated and observed. This ethnographic pilot study was an investigation of the merits of the project as a twenty-first century learning tool, where twenty-first century learning is aligned with the views of John Dewey and Paulo Freire. The project is considered for its strength as a progressive learning space through the lens of contemporary informal online learning spaces knowns as affinity spaces (Gee, 2005), and “energizing moments” a tool developed through data analysis. Affinity spaces are nonhierarchical and constructivist in nature, and participants of all ages learn from one another based on shared interests. Specifically the fourteen features of nurturing affinity spaces (Gee & Hayes, 2012) were used as reflective tools through which to consider the strength of the project as a constructivist learning environment. Each feature was then evaluated through a five point rubric and ranked according to its relative strength. To further corroborate the merit of the project from a student centred perspective, “energizing moments” provided indicators of the moments when the participants were most highly engaged by the work. This is another approach to attending to the strength of this project, and perhaps other projects as well, based on the idea that student motivation matters. Identifying energizing moments throughout the project can not only provide further insight into the strength of the project from a student-centred perspective, but can support strategies for enabling future such motivation. These tools were used to derive recommendations towards future iterations of the project. This research comes from the perspective that twenty-first century learning strategies have much to learn about pedagogy from the ways young people are motivated within the context of specific projects, and from their informal learning choices outside of school through technology and the internet. Keywords: video games, gender, new-media literacy, collaboration, progressive education, traditional education, twenty-first century learning, real-world learning, experiential learning, partnerships