Creativity within the foundation phase curriculum: A risky business?

Whilst creative behaviours are viewed as twenty-first century competencies [Davies, L.M., L.D. Newton, and D.P. Newton. 2017. “Creativity As a Twenty-First-Century Competence: An Exploratory Study of Provision and Reality.” Education 3–13, 879–891.], understandings within education remain vague [Prentice, R. 2000. “Creativity: A Reaffirmation of Its Place in Early Childhood Education.” The Curriculum Journal 11 (2): 145–158. doi:10.1080/09585170050045173]. Through a focus on two Welsh primary headteachers, this paper illuminates two contrasting constructions of school-based creativity and considers associated pedagogical practices. Whilst the creativity literature foregrounds child agency within risk-taking environments [Grainger, T. and J. Barnes. 2006. “Creativity in the primary curriculum.” In Learning to Teach in the Primary School, edited by A. James, T. Grainger, and D. Wray, 209–225. London: Routledge.], analysis of the first setting suggests that the privileging of accountability to external markers may lead to risk-aversion as creativity is shaped through a ‘policy panopticon’ [Ball, S. J. 2003. "The Teacher's Soul and the Terrors of Performativity." Journal of Education Policy 18 (2): 215–228. doi:10.1080/0268093022000043065.]. A shift from traditional arts-based views of creativity towards an emphasis upon creative behaviours may be advantageous and a reconstruction of accountability as starting at the micro level of the child. Whilst the post-Donaldson zeitgeist offers hope, this may still be challenging where high stakes assessments remain. These tensions are significant to practitioners since implicit understandings of ‘creativity’ impact on the pedagogies offered to children

Design Patterns for Voice Interaction in Games

Voice interaction is increasingly common in digital games, but it remains a notoriously difficult modality to design a satisfying experience for. This is partly due to limitations of speech recognition technology, and partly due to the inherent awkwardness we feel when performing some voice actions. We present a pattern language for voice interaction elements in games, to help game makers explore and describe common approaches to this design challenge. We define 25 design patterns, based on a survey of 449 videogames and 22 audiogames that use the player’s voice as an input to affect the game state. The patterns express how games frame and structure voice input, and how voice input is used for selection, navigation, control and performance actions. Finally, we argue that academic research has been overly concentrated on a single one of these design patterns, due to an instrumental research focus and a lack of interest in the fictive dimension of videogames

Virtual Reality as an Empirical Research Tool - Exploring User Experience in a Real Building and a Corresponding Virtual Model

Virtual reality allows highly-detailed observations, accurate behavior measurements, and systematic environmental manipulations under controlled laboratory circumstances. Therefore, it has the potential to be a valuable research tool for studies in human-environment interaction and ‘pre-occupancy' building evaluation. In order to fully understand VR as a valid environmental Virtual reality (VR) allows for highly-detailed observations, accurate behavior measurements, and systematic environmental manipulations under controlled laboratory circumstances. It therefore has the potential to be a valuable research tool for studies in human–environment interaction, such as building usability studies and post- as well as pre-occupancy building evaluation in architectural research and practice. In order to fully understand VR as a valid environmental representation, it is essential to examine to what extent not only user cognition and behavior, but also users' experiences are analogous in real and virtual environments. This work presents a multi-method approach with two studies that investigated the correspondence of building users' experience in a real conference center and a highly-detailed virtual model of the same building as well as a third study that virtually implemented systematic redesigns to the existing building layout. In the context of reporting users' experiential building evaluations, this article discusses the potential, prerequisites and opportunities for the implementation of virtual environments as an empirical research tool in the field of human–environment interaction. Based on quantitative data, few statistically significant differences between ratings of the real and the virtual building were found; however analyses based on qualitative data revealed differences relating to atmospherics. The main conclusion of this article is that VR has a strong potential to be used as an empirical research tool in psychological and architectural research and that future studies could supplement behavioral validation