CeRC Story-Game Engine: An open source technology to power story based investigation games

Playing computer games is widely popular among children and teenagers as an entertainment activity; however computer games can also be easily transformed into tools for education. City University London’s City eHealth Research Centre (CeRC) - has developed such educational computer games to improve young people’s understanding of the importance of hand and respiratory hygiene and responsible antibiotic use; and to teach school syllabus concepts such as microbes, the spread and prevention of infection, antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance. We have developed a game platform as an open-source framework to promote game development for education and entertainment. The platform enables the efficient development of new games with new learning objectives along with the ability to support translation into any language. For example, the current CeRC games have been translated into 11 European languages (English, BelgianFrench, Flemish, Czech, Danish, French, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish). The existing CeRC games are targeted towards school children; however, we investigate the usability of utilizing such games for adult education as well as examining the effectiveness of these games to convey messages to particular academic, industrial (or otherwise) communities

Evaluation of Popularity of Multi-lingual Educational Web Games – Do All Children Speak English?

Playing computer games is widely popular among children and teenagers as an entertainment activity; however, computer games can also be easily transformed into tools for education. City University London’s City eHealth Research Centre (CeRC) has developed such educational web games as a part of a European Project, e-Bug (www.e-bug.eu) to improve pupils understanding of the importance of hand and respiratory hygiene and responsible antibiotic use. This paper studies the usage of the Games between January 2009 and March 2010, specifically for 10 European Union countries. The Games were first provided in English-only and it was found that over half of the users were from non-UK countries. Once the Games were translated into multiple European languages, it was found that users preferred to play the Games in their native tongue. Thus, English was not a hindrance to Game playing/access; however, the option of using another language was always taken once provided. Users found the website through search engines and direct links from schools and other websites, and over 60,000 visitors played the Games at least once. The quantitative data used to investigate our research questions stemmed from the Games website server logs

Seratonergic modulation of cortical regeneration and behavioural recovery following neonatal injury

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Detection of apnoeic and breathing activity through pole-zero analysis of the SpO2 signal.

A new method using autoregressive modelling and pole tracking is proposed to detect cyclical activity within the oxygen saturation signal , SpO(2), for subjects with Obstructive Sleep Apnoea (OSA). OSA is a sleep condition whereby the upper airway is obstructed and cessation in respiration (apnoea) occurs. The three types of detected activity include: apnoea, mix, and normal breathing, where mix refers to breathing with a low-frequency component . Overall classifications produced by the analysis are in close agreement with expert scoring of the database. Furthermore, the pole-zero analysis method allows, for the first time, the mix sections to be identified automatically

Computer games to teach hygiene: an evaluation of the e-Bug junior game

Handwashing, respiratory hygiene and antibiotic resistance remain major public health concerns. In order to facilitate an effective outcome when teaching the basic principles of hand and respiratory hygiene, educational interventions should first target school children. As computer games are ubiquitous in most children's lives, e-Bug developed computer games targeted at teaching children handwashing, respiratory hygiene and antibiotic resistance. The games were designed for two target audiences: junior school children (9–12 year olds); and senior school children (13–15 year olds). Between May and August 2009, the finalized junior game underwent an evaluation in three UK schools (in Glasgow, Gloucester and London), involving 62 children in the schools and ∼1700 players accessing the junior game online. The e-Bug junior game consists of a number of levels of play, each of which promotes a set of learning outcomes (LOs). These LOs, complementary to those in the e-Bug packs, are expressed through the game mechanics (the rules of the game) rather than through story or dialogue. Although the junior game's evaluation demonstrated a statistically significant change in the knowledge for only a small number of given LOs, because many children had the required knowledge already before playing the game, this is e-Bug's first statistical study on the junior game and the first comprehensive evaluation of its kind. Future work includes a re-examination of the quiz-style questionnaires utilized in this study and an exploration of the potential knowledge change acquired strictly through engagement