Unzugängliche Welten für das erfahrungsbasierte Lernen erschließen. Immersive Virtuelle Realität im naturwissenschaftlichen Sachunterricht

Die Autor*innen befassen sich mit der Erschließung „Unzugängliche[r] Welten für das erfahrungsbasierte Lernen“, indem sie Potenziale der Integration Immersiver Virtueller Realität (IVR) in den naturwissenschaftlichen Sachunterricht erläutern. Designprinzipien und Beispiele für die Nutzung von Immersiver Virtueller Realität im naturwissenschaftlichen Sachunterricht werden anhand einer exemplarischen Sachunterrichtseinheit zum so genannten kleinen Wasserkreislauf aufgezeigt und diskutiert. (DIPF/Orig.)Active experience and manipulation are crucial sources of learning. However, many scientific topics are not accessible to our senses, such as microscopic or macroscopic structures and processes. By combining immersive and interactive elements, virtual reality offers a promising way to connect inaccessible parts of the world to direct sensory experience. This article explores possible guidelines for creating effective learning environments by reviewing opportunities and risks related to the use of virtual reality in science education. These ideas are illustrated with an example of virtual-reality-based teaching about the water cycle in primary school. (DIPF/Orig.

Focus on the essential: All great apes know when others are being attentive

When begging for food, all great ape species are sensitive to a human’s attention. However, studies investigating which cues are relevant for chimpanzees to assess the attentional state of others have produced highly inconsistent results. Some have suggested chimpanzees differentiate attention based on the status of the face or even the eyes, while others have indicated that body posture alone is the relevant cue. Kaminski et al. (Anim Cogn 7:216–223, 2004) compared the behaviour of chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans while begging for food from a human experimenter who systematically varied his face and body orientation. Their results indicated that both factors, face and body orientation, affect apes’ begging behaviour. The authors claimed that while body orientation provides information about the experimenter’s general disposition to offer food, the visibility of the face provides information about the human’s attentional state. In the current study, we tested this hypothesis with all four great apes species. However, unlike Kaminski et al. (Anim Cogn 7:216–223, 2004), the experimenter was able to hand over food regardless of body orientation. The results show that as soon as the offering of the food was no longer restricted, the orientation of the face became the key factor. Therefore, we present the first evidence that all great ape species are able to assess the attentional state of a recipient based on the orientation of the face

Domestic dogs comprehend human communication with iconic signs

A key skill in early human development is the ability to comprehend communicative intentions as expressed in both nonlinguistic gestures and language. In the current studies, we confronted domestic dogs (some of whom knew many human 'words') with a task in which they had to infer the intended referent of a human's communicative act via iconic signs - specifically, replicas and photographs. Both trained and untrained dogs successfully used iconic replicas to fetch the desired item, with many doing so from the first trial. Dogs' ability to use photographs in this same situation was less consistent. Because simple matching to sample in experimental contexts typically takes hundreds of trials (and because similarity between iconic sign and target item did not predict success), we propose that dogs' skillful performance in the current task reflects important aspects of the comprehension of human communicative intentions.</p

Numerical study of boundary-layer receptivity on a swept wing

Direct numerical simulations (DNS) of the flow over a wing with 45◦ sweep and −4◦ angle-of-attack are presented. This flow configuration was investigated in a series of wind-tunnel experiments at the Arizona State University (ASU). On the upper wing side, the flow develops a substantial crossflow and is therefore ideally suited for a study of the receptivity mechanisms of crossflow vortices. Here, we examine the boundary-layer receptivity to surface roughness and to single vortical free-stream modes. The roughness is modeled by a shallow circular disk and is identical with one single element of the spanwise roughness array considered in the ASU experiments. The boundary layer develops a steady crossflow mode downstream of the roughness. The spatial evolution of the modal amplitude obtained by the DNS is in excellent agreement with a solution to the nonlinear parabolized stability equations (NPSE) while being lower than that measured in the experiments. The reasons for this discrepancy are yet to be determined. Possible explanations are the idealization of the roughness array by spanwise periodic boundary conditions in our simulations, or the presence of traveling crossflow waves due to background free-stream turbulence in the experiments. We demonstrate that the boundary-layer receptivity to roughness can be successfully predicted by a nonlocal, adjoint-based receptivity model. Stationary crossflow vortices can also be triggered by zero-frequency free-stream vortical modes. We consider two types of mode, carrying stream wise and chordwise vorticity. Both modes give rise to nonmodal disturbances near the leading edge, which soon evolve into a steady crossflow mode. The boundary layer is found to be somewhat more receptive to the streamwisevorticity mode than to the chordwise vorticity.QC 2010102