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Successful Instructional Diagrams by Ric Lowe, London, Kogan Page, 1993. ISBN: 0–7494–0711–5
Leisure Is Hard Work: Digital Practices and Future Competencies
Part of the Volume on Youth, Identity, and Digital Media This chapter is based on two claims, namely that digital media are fundamental in nurturing human competencies for the future and that children's leisured media practices are critical catalysts in that process. These claims are documented by results from a recent case study on children's content creation of digital animation. Based on these results, the chapter discusses some of the fundamental challenges posed to educational institutions if they are to nurture future-directed competences for all pupils. These challenges include pupils' understanding of knowledge, their attitudes to learning resources and contexts of use, and the distribution of power relations. Like 300 million other kids around the globe, every Dane under the age of 20 knows that the protagonist of The Little Mermaid is Ariel, a fiesty redhead who manages to shape her fate and fortune. This fact is noteworthy only because Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, the author of the orignal fairy tale, composed a tragic tale of loss and redemption. The narrative and experiential discrepancies raise fundamental questions about the ways in which global and local media products frame children's everyday culture and the ways in which media operate as identity markers in a variety of sociocultural contexts. Moreover, Disney's figures, like many other media elements, are routinely appropriated by children in their own, increasingly digitized, media productions, from simple drawings to blogs, screen dumps, and home pages. These practices raise important issues about the role played by digital forms of media production for children vis a vis the more conventional and widespread forms of media reception
(MU-CTL-01-12) Towards Model Driven Game Engineering in SimSYS: Requirements for the Agile Software Development Process Game
Software Engineering (SE) and Systems Engineering (Sys) are knowledge intensive, specialized, rapidly changing disciplines; their educational infrastructure faces significant challenges including the need to rapidly, widely, and cost effectively introduce new or revised course material; encourage the broad participation of students; address changing student motivations and attitudes; support undergraduate, graduate and lifelong learning; and incorporate the skills needed by industry. Games have a reputation for being fun and engaging; more importantly immersive, requiring deep thinking and complex problem solving. We believe educational games are essential in the next generation of e-learning tools. An extensible, freely available, engaging, problem-based game platform that provides students with an interactive simulated experience closely resembling the activities performed in a (real) industry development project would transform the SE/Sys education infrastructure.
Our goal is to extend the state-of-the-art research in SE/Sys education by investigating a game development platform (GDP) from an interdisciplinary perspective (education, game research, and software/systems engineering). A meta-model has been proposed to provide a rigourous foundation that integrates the three disciplines. The GDP is intended to support the semi-automated development of collections of scripted games and their execution, where each game embodies a specific set of learning objectives. The games are scripted using a template based approach. The templates integrate three approaches: use cases; storyboards; and state machines (timed, concurrent, hierarchical state machines). The specification templates capture the structure of the game (Game, Acts, Scenes, Screens, Challenges), storyline, characters (player, non-player, external), graphics, music/sound effects, rules, and so on. The instantiated templates are (manually) transformed into XML game scripts that can be loaded into the SimSYS Game Play Engine. As a game is played, the game play events are logged; they are analyzed to automatically assess a player’s accomplishments and automatically adapt the game play script.
Currently, we are manually defining a collection of games. The games are being used to ensure the GDP is flexible and reliable (i.e., the prototype can load and correctly run a variety of game scripts), the ontology is comprehensive, and the templates assist in defining well-organized, modular game scripts. In this report, we present the initial part of an Agile Software Development Process game (Act I, Scenes 1 and 2) that embodies learning objectives related to SE fundamentals (requirements, architecture, testing, process); planning with Gantt charts; working with budgets; and selecting a team for an agile development project. A student player is rewarded in the game by getting hired, scoring points, or getting promoted to lead a project. The game has a variety of settings including a classroom, job fair, and a work environment with meeting rooms, cubicles, and a water cooler station. The main non-player characters include a teacher, boss, and an evil peer.
In the future, semi-automated support for creating new game scripts will be explored using a wizard interface. The templates will be formally defined, supporting automated transformation into XML game scripts that can be loaded into the SimSYS Game Engine. We also plan to explore transforming the requirements into a notation that can be imported into a commercial tool that supports Statechart simulation
Microalgae production in fresh market wastewater and its utilization as a protein substitute in formulated fish feed for oreochromis spp.
Rapid growing of human population has led to increasing demand of aquaculture production. Oreochromis niloticus or known as tilapia is one of the most globally cultured freshwater fish due to its great adaptation towards extreme environment. Besides, farming of tilapia not only involves small scales farming for local consumption but also larger scales for international market which contributes to a foreign currency earning. Extensive use of fishmeal as feed for fish and for other animals indirectly caused an increasing depletion of the natural resource and may consequently cause economic and environmental unstable. Microalgae biomass seems to be a promising feedstock in aquaculture industry. It can be used for many purposes such as live food for fish larvae and dried microalgae to substitute protein material in fish feed. The microalgae replacement in fish feed formulation as protein alternative seem potentially beneficial for long term aqua-business sustainability. The present chapter discussed the potential of microalgae as an alternative nutrition in fish feed formulations, specifically Tilapia
Sketching-out virtual humans: From 2d storyboarding to immediate 3d character animation
Virtual beings are playing a remarkable role in today’s public entertainment, while ordinary users are still treated as audiences due to the lack of appropriate expertise, equipment, and computer skills. In this paper, we present a fast and intuitive storyboarding interface, which enables users to sketch-out 3D virtual humans, 2D/3D animations, and character intercommunication. We devised an intuitive “stick figurefleshing-outskin mapping” graphical animation pipeline, which realises the whole process of key framing, 3D pose reconstruction, virtual human modelling, motion path/timing control, and the final animation synthesis by almost pure 2D sketching. A “creative model-based method” is developed, which emulates a human perception process, to generate the 3D human bodies of variational sizes, shapes, and fat distributions. Meanwhile, our current system also supports the sketch-based crowd animation and the storyboarding of the 3D multiple character intercommunication. This system has been formally tested by various users on Tablet PC. After minimal training, even a beginner can create vivid virtual humans and animate them within minutes
Code Shrew: Software platform for teaching programming through drawings and animations
In this paper, we present Code Shrew, a new software platform accompanied by
an interactive programming course. Its aim is to teach the fundamentals of
computer programming by enabling users to create their own drawings and
animations. The programming language has a straightforward syntax based on
Python, with additions that enable easy drawing and animating using
object-oriented code. The editor reacts seamlessly and instantly, providing an
engaging and interactive environment for experimenting and testing ideas. The
programming course consists of lessons that cover essential programming
principles, as well as challenges to test users' skills as they progress
through the course. Both the lessons and challenges take advantage of the
editor's instant feedback, allowing for a focus on learning-by-doing. We
describe the software and the content, the motivation behind them, and their
connection to constructionism.Comment: 7 page
Improving course related information of computing degree courses for enhancing learner development
In this paper, I present action research based on Norton's ITDEM model (Norton, 2009), which I applied to investigate an observed course related information problem in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Bedfordshire. The data collection was a combination of both interviews and surveys. Three lecturers and 100 students from the department participated in the action research. The collected data was analysed using thematic and content analysis. The findings of the investigation identified a problem in course related information integration and presentation. Both the lecturers and some students thought that the problem has impacted on the students' learning and development. In an effort to tackle the problem, useful approaches proposed by other universities and the valuable suggestions made by the participants have been collected for further investigation and adaptation. Overall, action research is found to be a helpful methodology to improve course related information of computing degree courses, which will not only help prospective students' course selection and enhance existing students' learning and development, but also build up the department's and university's reputation
Augmented Reality in Astrophysics
Augmented Reality consists of merging live images with virtual layers of
information. The rapid growth in the popularity of smartphones and tablets over
recent years has provided a large base of potential users of Augmented Reality
technology, and virtual layers of information can now be attached to a wide
variety of physical objects. In this article, we explore the potential of
Augmented Reality for astrophysical research with two distinct experiments: (1)
Augmented Posters and (2) Augmented Articles. We demonstrate that the emerging
technology of Augmented Reality can already be used and implemented without
expert knowledge using currently available apps. Our experiments highlight the
potential of Augmented Reality to improve the communication of scientific
results in the field of astrophysics. We also present feedback gathered from
the Australian astrophysics community that reveals evidence of some interest in
this technology by astronomers who experimented with Augmented Posters. In
addition, we discuss possible future trends for Augmented Reality applications
in astrophysics, and explore the current limitations associated with the
technology. This Augmented Article, the first of its kind, is designed to allow
the reader to directly experiment with this technology.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap&SS. The final
publication will be available at link.springer.co
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