Gamifying sustainability : raising carbon footprint awareness through gamification : the carbon footprint movement

Extreme human-induced environmental pressures are being felt across the globe. Scientific evidence increasingly alerts for the urgent need to induce societal engagement in climate change mitigation to achieve carbon-reduction targets. This thesis’ overreaching purpose aimed at appraising the extent to which a gamification-based system may increase carbon literacy and empower individuals to adopt lower-carbon lifestyles. Simultaneously, this study explores the hotspots where policy action should be taken to reduce the contextual barriers to more pro-environmental lifestyles. Given the multitude of factors influencing behaviors, the research herein described disaggregated national data to local levels. To attain the set objectives, a gamified-survey tool was developed, as the primary learning and data collection instrument: The Carbon Footprint Movement. Results showed carbon footprint was not a primary deliberation preceding everyday behavior and that respondents’ misconceptions regarding the environmental effects of their actions prevailed. Additional findings also reinforced contextual factors further detached intentions from behaviors, intensifying the so-called value-action gap. Notwithstanding, participants reported carbon literacy increases (23%) and pledged imminent behavioral changes, over the course of the intervention. This dissertation reinforces high-magnitude carbon emissions to be locked-in at the household level, and the potentiality of gamified interventions to unlock substantial reductions. However, it simultaneously unveils large potential savings to remain unfulfilled, suggesting active civic engagement also calls for wider structural adjustments The methodology devised might be used to guide the development of future gamified interventions.Pressões ambientais extremas estão a ser sentidas em todo o mundo. Evidências científicas alertam para a necessidade urgente do envolvimento da sociedade na mitigação das alterações climáticas. Esta dissertação visa avaliar em que medida um sistema baseado na gamificação pode aumentar a literacia de carbono e capacitar os indivíduos para adotarem comportamentos mais sustentáveis. Paralelamente, este estudo explora os pontos críticos em que devem ser tomadas medidas para a redução de obstáculos a estilos de vida mais pró-ambientais. Para atingir os objetivos estabelecidos, foi desenvolvido um instrumento de aprendizagem e de recolha de dados: The Carbon Footprint Movement. Os resultados indicam que a tomada diária de decisões raramente é precedida de uma deliberação sobre a respetiva pegada de carbono, que as pessoas mantêm ideias erradas sobre a eficácia ambiental das suas ações, e que os fatores contextuais desassociam ainda mais as intenções dos comportamentos. Não obstante, os participantes reportaram aumentos em literacia de carbono (23%) e afirmaram mudanças comportamentais ao longo da intervenção. Esta dissertação destaca a potencialidade de intervenções gamificadas na redução substancial de emissões de carbono, bloqueadas ao nível doméstico. No entanto, este estudo revela que um envolvimento cívico mais ativo no combate às alterações climáticas exige, simultaneamente, ajustes estruturais fundamentais. A metodologia descrita poderá ser utilizada para orientar o desenvolvimento de futuras intervenções gamificadas

Mathematics education and technology

Recent international surveys such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report Students, Computers and Learning ( 2015) highlight the wide gap in students’ access to, and use of, technology in secondary mathematics in participating countries. The OECD “snapshot” methodology in which 15-year-old students were asked if they (or their teachers) had performed a range of mathematical tasks using computers in the month preceding their completion of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey revealed low levels of technology use (see Fig. 1)

An Historical Survey on Light Technologies

Following the celebration of the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies in 2015, this paper presents a survey of the exploitation of light throughout our history. Human beings started using light far into the Stone Age, in order to meet immediate needs, and widened its used when ancient civilizations developed. Other practical uses were conceived during the Middle Ages, some of which had a deep impact on social life. Nevertheless, it was after the Scientific Revolution and, to a wider extent, with the Industrial Revolution, that more devices were developed. The advancement of chemistry and electricity provided the ground and the tools for inventing a number of light-related devices, from photography to chemical and electrical lighting technologies. The deeper and broader scientific advancements of the twentieth century, throughout wave and quanta paradigms and the research on the interactions with matter at the sub-atomic level, have provided the knowledge for a much broader exploitation of light in several different fields, leading to the present technological domains of optoelectronics and photoelectronics, including cinema, image processing, lasers, photovoltaic cells, and optical discs. The recent success of fiber optics, white LEDs, and holography, evidence how vastly and deeply the interaction between light and man is still growing

Old and new Italian multinational firms

After a quick profile of Italian foreign direct investments since 1900 and a short review of the main explanations of the lagged multinational growth by Italian manufacturing companies, a quick glimpse of business histories is given to the only two still today living "old protagonists" (Pirelli, Fiat) and to three old corporate groups (Olivetti, SNIA Viscosa, Montecatini-Montedison) who had also reached a significant degree of full internationalization early in the XX century, but during the second postwar period underwent profound dismantling of their original business mission. Finally the paper focuses on few cases of "new protagonists", mid-size family companies who undertook a true multinational strategy only in the most recent decades and today represent the core of the Italian "fourth capitalism".Italian industry-multinational companies

The French Didactic Tradition in Mathematics

This chapter presents the French didactic tradition. It first describes theemergence and development of this tradition according to four key features (role ofmathematics and mathematicians, role of theories, role of design of teaching andlearning environments, and role of empirical research), and illustrates it through two case studies respectively devoted to research carried out within this traditionon algebra and on line symmetry-reflection. It then questions the influence of thistradition through the contributions of four researchers from Germany, Italy, Mexicoand Tunisia, before ending with a short epilogue