The impact of multimodal collaborative virtual environments on learning: A gamified online debate

Online learning platforms are integrated systems designed to provide students and teachers with information, tools and resources to facilitate and enhance the delivery and management of learning. In recent years platform designers have introduced gamification and multimodal interaction as ways to make online courses more engaging and immersive. Current Web-based platforms provide a limited degree of immersion in learning experiences, thereby diminishing potential learning impact. To improve immersion, it is necessary to stimulate some or all the human senses by engaging users in an environment that perceptually surrounds them and allows intuitive and rich interaction with other users and its content. Learning in these collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) can be aided by increasing motivation and engagement through the gamification of the educational task. This rich interaction that combines multimodal stimulation and gamification of the learning experience has the potential to draw students into the learning experience and improve learning outcomes. This paper presents the results of an experimental study designed to evaluate the impact of multimodal real-time interaction on user experience and learning of gamified educational tasks completed in a CVE. Secondary school teachers and students participated in the study. The multimodal CVE is an accurate reconstruction of the European Parliament in Brussels, developed using the REVERIE (Real and Virtual Engagement In Realistic Immersive Environment) framework. In the study, we compared the impact of the VR parliament to a non-multimodal control (an educational platform called Edu-Simulation) for the same educational tasks. Our results show that the multimodal CVE improves student learning performance and aspects of subjective experience when compared to the non-multimodal control. More specifically it resulted in a more positive effect on the ability of the students to generate ideas compared to a non-multimodal control. It also facilitated a sense of presence (strong emotional and a degree of spatial) for students in the VE. The paper concludes with a discussion of future work that focusses on combining the best features of both systems in a hybrid system to increase its educational impact and evaluate the prototype in real-world educational scenarios

Postfledging Survival, Movements, and Dispersal of Ring Ouzels (Turdus torquatus)

We thank Invercauld Estate for cooperation with access to Glen Clunie. S. Redpath, J. Wilson, and S. Roos provided valuable comments on the manuscript. This study was funded by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Scottish Natural Heritage, and the Cairngorms National Park Authority. J.L.L. was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Double-detonation sub-Chandrasekhar supernovae: synthetic observables for minimum helium shell mass models

Abridged. In the double detonation scenario for Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) a detonation initiates in a shell of He-rich material accreted from a companion star by a sub-Chandrasekhar-mass White Dwarf (WD). This shell detonation drives a shock front into the carbon-oxygen (C/O) WD that triggers a secondary detonation in the core. The core detonation results in a complete disruption of the WD. Earlier studies concluded that this scenario has difficulties in accounting for the observed properties of SNe Ia since the explosion ejecta are surrounded by the products of explosive He burning in the shell. Recently, it was proposed that detonations might be possible for much less massive He shells than previously assumed. Moreover, it was shown that even detonations of these minimum He shell masses robustly trigger detonations of the C/O core. Here we present time-dependent multi-wavelength radiative transfer calculations for models with minimum He shell mass and derive synthetic observables for both the optical and {\gamma}-ray spectral regions. These differ strongly from those found in earlier simulations of sub-Chandrasekhar-mass explosions in which more massive He shells were considered. Our models predict light curves which cover both the range of brightnesses and the rise and decline times of observed SNe Ia. However, their colours and spectra do not match the observations. In particular, their B-V colours are generally too red. We show that this discrepancy is mainly due to the composition of the burning products of the He shell of our models which contain significant amounts of Ti and Cr. Using a toy model, we also show that the burning products of the He shell depend crucially on its initial composition. This leads us to conclude that good agreement between sub-Chandrasekhar-mass explosions and observed SNe Ia may still be feasible but further study of the shell properties is required.Comment: 17 pages, 13 figures. Accepted for publication by Ap

Time-stepping beyond CFL: a locally one-dimensional scheme for acoustic wave propagation

In this abstract, we present a case study in the application of a time-stepping method, unconstrained by the CFL condition, for computational acoustic wave propagation in the context of full waveform inversion. The numerical scheme is a locally one-dimensional (LOD) variant of alternating dimension implicit (ADI) method. The LOD method has a maximum time step that is restricted only by the Nyquist sampling rate. The advantage over traditional explicit time-stepping methods occurs in the presence of high contrast media, low frequencies, and steep, narrow perfectly matched layers (PML). The main technical point of the note, from a numerical analysis perspective, is that the LOD scheme is adapted to the presence of a PML. A complexity study is presented and an application to full waveform inversion is shown.National Science Foundation (U.S.); Alfred P. Sloan Foundatio

Interdisciplinary Approaches for Integrating Materials Science and Dentistry.

Dental materials science is a core course in most undergraduate dental curricula [...]

Conteúdos linguísticos como subsídio à formação de professores alfabetizadores: a experiência do Brasil e de Portugal

Objetiva identificar em dois programas de formação de professores alfabetizadores – no Brasil, Pacto Nacional pela Alfabetização na Idade Certa (Pnaic) e, em Portugal, Programa Nacional do Ensino do Português (Pnep) – os conteúdos linguísticos relacionados ao ensino da leitura que fundamentaram a atualização dos professores com vistas a compreender como as descobertas científicas penetram o campo pedagógico. Por meio de análise documental, são apresentadas, de forma resumida, a estrutura e a organização dos dois programas e os respectivos conteúdos de formação. Há muita similaridade entre os dois programas com relação à organização e às estratégias metodológicas e há diferenças importantes quanto à atualidade dos conteúdos oferecidos aos professores alfabetizadores, assim como o tempo de formação aplicado a este conteúdo. A formação linguística do professor é essencial para desenvolver competência para o ensino da língua e, por conseguinte, melhorar as habilidades de ler e escrever dos alunos do ensino fundamental.This article aims to identify the linguistic contents related to the teaching of reading in two training programs for literacy teachers: Brazil’s National Pact for Literacy at the Right Age (Pacto Nacional pela Alfabetização na Idade Certa – Pnaic) and the National Program for Portuguese Teaching (Programa Nacional do Ensino do Português – Pnep) of Portugal. The focus is on the linguistic contents that served as foundation for the updating of teachers, in order to understand how scientific discoveries permeate the teaching field. Through documentary analysis, the structure and the organization of the two programs and their respective training contents are briefly presented. There are many similarities between the two programs, regarding the organization and the methodological strategies; but there are also differences in relation to the timeliness of the content offered to the literacy teachers, as well as to the duration of the training applied to the content. The linguistic training of teachers is essential to developing the competence for language teaching and, therefore; for the improvement of reading and writing skills of elementary school students.CIEC - Centro de Investigação em Estudos da Criança, IE, UMinho (UI 317 da FCT), PortugalFundos Nacionais através da FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) e cofinanciado pelo Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional (FEDER) através do COMPETE 2020 – Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização (POCI) com a referência POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007562info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio