Exploring Digital Games-Based Learning Design for Enhancing Resilience in Higher Education Students:Unveiling the Potential of RESSIL

This study addresses the increasing recognition of resilience as a pivotal component of student success against the backdrop of mounting concerns regarding student mental health and wellbeing in higher education. Drawing from interdisciplinary literature, the study integrates insights from resilience theory and digital game-based learning to inform the design of an adventure-based digital game, ‘Resilience Education Supports Students in Life’ (RESSIL), aimed at developing the resilience capacities of undergraduate students.A purposeful pilot study approach supports an exploration of the User Experience (Ux) to gain insights into the effectiveness and value of RESSIL’s design and its potential for achieving its intended aim. Focus group discussions engage undergraduate students from diverse academic backgrounds and thematic analysis sheds light on the effectiveness of RESSIL's game design in fostering engagement, facilitating knowledge transfer, and nurturing resilience-related skills among players.The findings underscore the significance of integrating narrative-driven gameplay and multisensory engagement to cultivate meaningful Ux and improve learning outcomes. Furthermore, the study highlights the critical role of aligning learning content with game elements to ensure coherence and optimise the game's utility. Insights gained from this pilot study offer valuable guidance for enhancing the game and lay the foundation for a larger study investigating RESSIL’s efficacy as a resilience intervention. This research contributes to the ongoing discourse on DGBL in higher education, emphasising the importance of user-centered design principles and co-creation methodologies in developing effective educational games

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead