Tokoyo: A Story of Cultural Movement

Tokoyo: A Story of Cultural Movement is an exploration of Japanese culture through performance. The piece incorporates stylized, ritualistic, and contemporary movement. The device used to portray our research was a folk tale told solely through physical expression. Music by Japanese composers and projections of the country supported the movement and helped to tell the story of the culture. We were deep into our research when we embarked on our trip to Japan to observe the specificity of the culture in everyday life and performance. Everything that we read, watched, and took part in manifested itself in the final presentation. The stylistic form of the piece was influenced by our studies and experiences within the Syracuse University Drama Department. We used a Japanese traditional folk tale about a young girl named Tokoyo to demonstrate both the physical culture and the societal priorities of the Japanese people. The process began with rigorous research of everything from the mie poses of Kabuki theatre to the way in which Japanese people board a subway car. Once we learned all that we could from books and videos we were fortunate enough to travel to Tokyo to immerse ourselves in the culture. In Tokyo we furthered our understanding of the Japanese lifestyle through observation, conversation, and participation. The process of developing an entertaining and educational piece of theatre began with story boarding, developing characters, and devising a way to include traditional and contemporary movement in one unified performance piece. We started our choreography of the story with a prologue to establish the relationship between the two central characters: Tokoyo and her father. Each movement was specific to what we had learned in our research and placed in the piece to demonstrate an aspect of gestural language. This made the work of creating the performance twice as difficult. We had to not only focus on storytelling but on the research that we had accumulated. The piece was well received by audiences that left the theatre with opened eyes to a culture so far from their own as well as an avant-garde theatre style. Though the audience didn’t understand or acknowledge the significance of every single nuance of the culture, they understood the themes of the story and the underlying emotions of the characters. Our performance educated our audience on a culture of which they may have had no prior knowledge. To do so through movement is extremely powerful. Movement has no language barrier and though the gestures may seem foreign the feelings emoted are clear. Body language is the ultimate communicator; watching an American member of our audience moved to tears by an unknown Japanese phrase of movement proves that this is true. This universal connection of humanity is just what we sought to demonstrate when we decided to explore cultural movement

Intergenerational learning in and around the home setting: Who are the learners and how do they learn?

Children spend a relatively large amount of time in and around the home setting, where intergenerational encounters may contribute to their learning. As a result of demographic and societal changes, vertical links within families between children and their grandparents could become very important. This may particularly apply where grandparents have moved to join their families who have migrated and where they could play an important role with regard to intergenerational learning. To investigate the nature of intergenerational learning exchanges young children with Sylheti/Bengali-speaking grandparents or monolingual English-speaking families of mixed ethnicity living in East London were recruited. Case studies of the families were conducted through interviews, observation, video-recordings, and scrapbooks. A qualitative analysis examined the patterns of learning interactions and the kinds of knowledge exchanged. Findings suggest that children and their grandparents take part in a wide range of activities where learning interactions are co-constructed within a relationship of trust and security, and where all participants contribute and learn. A wide range of concepts and skills was developed through intergenerational learning. The findings are discussed in relation to different notions of generation, and in relation to learning perspectives summarised as a framework representing learner agency and social engagement

Digitally retelling the tale: children’s learning encounters and materiality

While much existing work on digital storytelling with young people has focused prominently upon presenting their own personal narratives and viewpoints, relatively little attention has been given to learning that could arise from digital adaptations by young children of existing and well-known stories. This article reports work exploring learning activities through a case study involving three pupils (aged 8, 10 and 12) and their teachers engaged over a six-month period in digitally retelling a fairy tale from a printed storybook. In addition to considering the role of the printed text and the learning opportunities arising from its digital retelling, discussion focuses on how the findings cohere with more recently developing theoretical perspectives on learning that in addition to the social take into account the role of the material

And He\u27d Say Oo-La-La-Wee-Wee

Willie Earl met a sweet young girl one day in France,Her naughty little glance, put Willie in a trance; Willie Earl couldn\u27t understand her talk you see,He only knew two words in FrenchThat he learned in the trench,They were oo-la-la and wee-wee. They would spoon beneath the moon aboveIt was fun to hear them making love. ChorusShe\u27d say compronay voo, papa? and he\u27d say oo-la-la! wee-wee She\u27d smile and whisper mercy bacoo He\u27d answer I don\u27t mind if I do She\u27d say if you be my papa then I will be your macherieShe\u27d pinch his cheek and say you keskasay:He\u27d say Not now, dear, but later I may; Then she\u27d say compronay voo, papa? and he\u27d say oo-la-la! wee-wee. Willie Earl said, this little girl is meant for me,No more I\u27ll cross to the sea,I\u27ll stay in Gay Paree.Ev\u27ry day you would hear him say to his babee, Your talk I do not know, but I,Will manage to get by, with my oo-la-la and wee-wee Ev\u27ry ev\u27ning Willie would rehearseInstead of getting better he got worse She\u27d say compronay voo, papa? and he\u27d say oo-la-la! wee-wee She\u27d say come see and then roll her eyes,He\u27d answer, baby you\u27d be surprised. Each ev\u27ning they would promenade,upon zeboulevarde you see;One day at lunch she said cafe voola He said my dear, don\u27t forget where you are; Then she\u27d say compronay voo, papa? and he\u27d say oo-la-la! wee-wee

Procedural 3D urban content generation in simulation and games

As virtual urban environment generation becomes a widespread research topic, the need to create enriched urban worlds, which group both the geometric and semantic properties has become a necessity, the purpose being to obtain interactive, adaptive and consistent world entities. This paper suggests a representational model of urban environment generation based on both geometric and semantic knowledge, the future work being to create a modelling tool of a 3D urban environment, which stores the semantic information and allows the final non expert user to acquire information about the environment before and after its creation and to explore this information in an interactive way

Procedural and semantic modeling of virtual environments for serious games development

International audienceVirtual environments are useful tools for visualization, discovery as well as training. In serious or learning games contexts, 3D graphical worlds, interaction, navigation and immersion capabilities are needed to propel narration and emotion. Furthermore, they are key elements to materialize pedagogical content and to support knowledge transfer. Semantic modeling, serious game classification and gameplay component identification allow generating serious game scenarios linked to the 3D world modeling and interaction or animation capabilities

Baby Blue Eyes

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/3841/thumbnail.jp

Translation from Braille Music Mark-up Language to DAISYXML

As result of the Contrapunctus European project the design of the Braille Music Mark-up as an XML representation of a music scores in Braille has been carried out. We propose a design of a prototype system for translating these kinds of files into spoken music encoded in DAISYXML. In this way any blind musician may be able to memorize any Braille score using a DAISY reader. Therefore the dependency of reading BMML files in front of a computer would be eliminated. This is a first work on feasibility which will be improved and managed by a working group