The use of competition and creativity as key-driver to promote scientific culture among students?

The pedagogical value of game generally speaking, has been extensively argued since the past by several studies of educational scientists (Fröbel, 1826; Decroly, 1921). This conception is based on the idea that young people owns great expressive and creative capabilities and that education, that often involved positive competitive interaction, is able to motivate young people to learn, involving them in knowledge process consistent with their interests and abilities. These kind of activities put at stake imagination and creativity and lead students to actively learn having fun together with their classmates. In this reality, competition, if proposed as further game element, could raise the quality participation of young people to didactical activities and enable collaborative learning processes in which everyone can give its personal contribution to the construction of knowledge seen as a great social game. Moreover, children and teens own several different languages and codes to express themselves that cannot be identified only with formal linguistic skills (oral and written) if we will not lose them (C. Edwards, L.Gandini, G. Forman, 1995)

Behavioral Change and Social Innovation Through Reward: An Integrated Engagement System for Personal Mobility, Urban Logistics and Housing Efficiency

Abstract A significant role among soft mobility measures to influence people's mobility choices and to raise awareness is played by the provision of targeted information. The integration of user-centered design, social innovation, portable devices, and sensors may have a role in influencing people's choices and consumption patterns. The paper presents two ongoing works that investigate, design and develop tools for valuing people's positive behaviors and rewarding choices in the domain of mobility and energy. The objective of such tools is both to raise people's awareness and to engage it into a collaborative environment, in order to meet a common set of targets. The strategy adopted in both the cases is based on linking "bottom-up" with "top-down" approach, i.e. by making people to behave and to make choices coordinately with decision maker's (i.e. the Public Administration or the Administrator of the system) objectives. The first regards Opti-LOG, a project co-funded by Regione Lombardia under the Smart Cities and Communities program, which concerns last-mile delivery with low emission and zero emission vehicles. The second case regards Sharing Cities, a H2020 project that includes a pilot project in the Municipality of Milano, where the focus is on citizen engagement and behaviors in the domains of personal mobility and energy. The system, by enabling mechanisms of collaboration, sharing and human capital generation, tackles the objectives of lowering energy consumption and promoting sustainable mobility and contributes to the weaving of a more cohesive social tissue

The use of competition and creativity as key driver to promote scientific culture among students

The use of didactic games in order to promote scientific culture leads to innovative methodologies and technologies that can be very effective for the learning process of students or simply to make them more curious about critical disciplines

A Real-time Information System for Public Transport in Case of Delays and Service Disruptions

AbstractPromoting the use of public transportation and Intelligent Transport Systems, as well as improving transit accessibility for all citizens, may help in decreasing traffic congestion and air pollution in urban areas. In general, poor information to customers is one of the main issues in public transportation services, which is an important reason for allocating substantial efforts to implement a powerful and easy to use and access information tool. This paper focuses on the design and development of a real time mobility information system for the management of unexpected events, delays and service disruptions concerning public transportation in the city of Milan. Exploiting the information on the status of urban mobility and on the location of citizens, commuters and tourists, the system is able to reschedule in real time their movements. The service proposed stems from the state of the art in the field of travel planners for public transportation, available for Milan. Peculiarly, we built a representation of the city transit based on a time-expanded graph that considers the interconnections among all the stops of the rides offered during the day. The structure distinguishes the physical stations and the get on/get off stops of each ride, representing them with two different types of nodes. Such structure allows, with regard to the main focus of the project, to model a wide range of service disruptions, much more meaningful than those possible with approaches currently proposed by transit agencies. One of the most interesting point lies in the expressive capability in describing the different disruptions: with our model it is possible, for instance, to selectively inhibit getting on and/or off at a particular station, avoid specific rides, and model temporary deviations

Probably Approximately Knowing

Whereas deterministic protocols are typically guaranteed to obtain particular goals of interest, probabilistic protocols typically provide only probabilistic guarantees. This paper initiates an investigation of the interdependence between actions and subjective beliefs of agents in a probabilistic setting. In particular, we study what probabilistic beliefs an agent should have when performing actions, in a protocol that satisfies a probabilistic constraint of the form: 'Condition C should hold with probability at least p when action a is performed'. Our main result is that the expected degree of an agent's belief in C when it performs a equals the probability that C holds when a is performed. Indeed, if the threshold of the probabilistic constraint should hold with probaility p=1-x^2 for some small value of x then, with probability 1-x, when the agent acts it will assign a probabilistic belief no smaller than 1-x to the possibility that C holds. In other words, viewing strong belief as, intuitively, approximate knowledge, the agent must probably approximately know (PAK-know) that C is true when it acts.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figures, a full version of a paper whose extended abstract appears in the proceeding of PODC 202