Improving girls’ perception of computer science as a viable career option through game playing and design: Lessons from a systematic literature review

The objective of exposing girls to Computer Science as a career option has led to research directed towards gaming activities for girls. These activities include both game play and game design. Research about gaming activities for increasing girls’ interest in computer science has gained much attention over the past few years and has resulted in a number of contributions. We follow up with an overview of the status of research through a Systematic Literature Review. We investigate the relation between the various game playing or designing activities and their impact on girls’ perception of Computer Science as a career choice. We further present the design consideration for the games and related activities to potentially improve the perception of girls towards a Computer Science career. The applied method is a Systematic Literature Review through which we investigate which contributions were made, which knowledge areas were most explored, and which research facets have been used. We identify 25 papers to distill a common understanding of the state-of-the-art. Specifically, we investigate the effects that the game play/design activities had on girls’ perception about Computer Science; and what are the key design factors to be kept in mind while designing a serious game to improve girls’ perception about Computer Science. The results of this systematic literature review show that game playing or designing could indeed improve how girls perceive having a career in CS. The key aspects that such activities require are personalizing, opportunity for collaboration and the presence of a female lead characterThis work has been done during the tenure of an ERCIM Alain Bensoussan fellowshi

Preface

Social collective intelligence is an emerging area at the intersection of collective intelligence and social informatics, where social processes between humans are being leveraged and enhanced, by means of advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), to solve challenging problems using the contributions of human collectives. Rather than being a well-defined area, it presents itself—at least for the time being—as a mix of various methods and technologies, such as social media and social computing, human-based computation, social networks and complex systems theory, crowdsourcing, and many other areas which all somehow aim at developing or understanding collectively intelligent systems by combining advanced ICT with the powers of individual and collective human intelligence. Within this broader area, while novel applications—from mobile social networking services to socially augmented reality systems—are appearing (and disappearing) at an ever-increasing rate, the ability to engineer these systems to concrete design objectives remains, until now, essentially a “black art‿. Although research in the different areas involved has produced many significant contributions, we are still far from a principled approach for designing and operating these kinds of systems

Social collective intelligence: combining the powers of humans and machines to build a smarter society

The book focuses on Social Collective Intelligence, a term used to denote a class of socio-technical systems that combine, in a coordinated way, the strengths of humans, machines and collectives in terms of competences, knowledge and problem solving capabilities with the communication, computing and storage capabilities of advanced ICT. Social Collective Intelligence opens a number of challenges for researchers in both computer science and social sciences; at the same time it provides an innovative approach to solve challenges in diverse application domains, ranging from health to education and organization of work. The book will provide a cohesive and holistic treatment of Social Collective Intelligence, including challenges emerging in various disciplines (computer science, sociology, ethics) and opportunities for innovating in various application areas. By going through the book the reader will gauge insight and knowledge into the challenges and opportunities provided by this new, exciting, field of investigation. Benefits for scientists will be in terms of accessing a comprehensive treatment of the open research challenges in a multidisciplinary perspective. Benefits for practitioners and applied researchers will be in terms of access to novel approaches to tackle relevant problems in their field. Benefits for policy-makers and public bodies representatives will be in terms of understanding how technological advances can support them in supporting the progress of society and economy

Social Collective IntelligenceCombining the Powers of Humans and Machines to Build a Smarter Society /

VIII, 276 p. 33 illus., 20 illus. in color.onlin

C-peptide ameliorates kidney injury following hemorrhagic shock

Reperfusion injury following hemorrhagic shock is accompanied by the development of a systemic inflammatory state that may lead to organ failure. C-peptide has been shown to exert anti-inflammatory effects in sepsis and myocardial ischemia-reperfusion injury, and to ameliorate renal dysfunction in diabetic animals. Hence, we investigated the effect of C-peptide on kidney injury following hemorrhagic shock. We hypothesized that C-peptide would exert reno-protective effects by blunting inflammation. Hemorrhagic shock was induced in male rats (3–4 months old) by withdrawing blood from the femoral artery to a mean arterial pressure of 50 mmHg. Animals were kept in shock for 3h at which time they were rapidly resuscitated by returning their shed blood. At the time of resuscitation and every hour thereafter, one group of animals received C-peptide (280 nmol/kg intravenously) while another group received vehicle. Hemorrhagic shock resulted in significant rise in plasma levels of creatinine and elevated kidney neutrophil infiltration as evaluated by myeloperoxidase (MPO) activity in vehicle-treated rats in comparison with sham rats, thus suggesting kidney injury. Treatment with C-peptide significantly attenuated the rise in creatinine and kidney MPO activity when compared to vehicle group. At a molecular level these effects of C-peptide were associated with reduced expression of the c-Fos subunit and reduced activation of the pro-inflammatory kinases, extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK 1/2) and c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) and subsequently, reduced DNA binding of activator protein-1 (AP-1) in the kidney. Thus, our data suggest that C-peptide may exert reno-protective effects following hemorrhagic shock by modulating AP-1 signaling