Beyond screen time: a synergistic approach to a more comprehensive assessment of family media exposure during early childhood

Digital media availability has surged over the past decade. Because of a lack of comprehensive measurement tools, this rapid growth in access to digital media is accompanied by a scarcity of research examining the family media context and sociocognitive outcomes. There is also little cross-cultural research in families with young children. Modern media are mobile, interactive, and often short in duration, making them difficult to remember when caregivers respond to surveys about media use. The Comprehensive Assessment of Family Media Exposure (CAFE) Consortium has developed a novel tool to measure household media use through a web-based questionnaire, time-use diary, and passive-sensing app installed on family mobile devices. The goal of developing a comprehensive assessment of family media exposure was to take into account the contextual factors of media use and improve upon the limitations of existing self-report measures, while creating a consistent, scalable, and cost-effective tool. The CAFE tool captures the content and context of early media exposure and addresses the limitations of prior media measurement approaches. Preliminary data collected using this measure have been integrated into a shared visualization platform. In this perspective article, we take a tools-of-the-trade approach (Oakes, 2010) to describe four challenges associated with measuring household media exposure in families with young children: measuring attitudes and practices; capturing content and context; measuring short bursts of mobile device usage; and integrating data to capture the complexity of household media usage. We illustrate how each of these challenges can be addressed with preliminary data collected with the CAFE tool and visualized on our dashboard. We conclude with future directions including plans to test reliability, validity, and generalizability of these measures

Pervasive games

Pervasive games are bridging the physical and digital worlds through the use of mobile devices, positioning technology, and mobile networks. They received an uptake since the Global Positioning System (GPS) became available for public use in May 2000. Since then, pervasive games have been studied in a number of research projects and have reached the mass market by now. Furthermore, their concepts have been applied to mobile augmented learning experiences which makes them very relevant also for the design of serious games. This chapter provides a historical introduction and highlights aspects of pervasive games illustrated by examples. It continues with a discussion of what pervasive games are made of, how they are built, and which recurring issues have to be considered when building and deploying them. The chapter concludes with considerations about how pervasive games went from research to application and how that relates to budget and marketing efforts. Finally, it provides recommendations for further reading and some research questions towards using pervasive games in mobile educational research

Influence of problem-based games on effective computer programming learning in higher education

[[abstract]]Gaming is a part of today’s society, especially for younger generations. Therefore, game-based approaches are unsurprisingly used for learning achievement. In this study, a game-based learning courseware was implemented using a problem-based strategy. For this purpose, a game known as ‘Programmer Adventure Land’ was designed and developed. A group of college students were asked to play the game to improve their knowledge of computer programming. Results indicated that the problem-based learning approach of the game can enhance the satisfaction, enjoyment, motivation, and user interface for the problem-based game learning courseware. The main finding of this study is that Problem-based games provide teachers with an effective approach for enhancing students’ learning satisfaction in difficult subjects, such as computer programming.[[sponsorship]]MOST 103-2511-S-032-006-MY2[[notice]]補正完