Using Gamification to Motivate Students with Dyslexia

The concept of gamification is receiving increasing attention, particularly for its potential to motivate students. However, to date the majority of studies in the context of education have predominantly focused on University students. This paper explores how gamification could potentially benefit a specific student population, children with dyslexia who are transitioning from primary to secondary school. Two teachers from specialist dyslexia teaching centres used classDojo, a gamification platform, during their teaching sessions for one term. We detail how the teachers appropriated the platform in different ways and how the students discussed classDojo in terms of motivation. These findings have subsequently informed a set of provisional implications for gamification distilling opportunities for future pedagogical uses, gamification design for special education and methodological approaches to how gamification is studied

Reflections on Personalized Games-Based Learning: How Automation Is Shaped Within Everyday School Practices

Digital games for primary education are often designed to foster children’s learning through motivated practice with core subjects, such as literacy and math. Over the years, and accelerated by the pandemic, these games have become an embedded part of the primary school classroom. Many of them rely on AI and thus automation to adapt children’s learning game tasks and personalize the learning to the child’s learning needs. While removing the requirement for the teacher to plan what students do with the technology, children’s engagement with digital learning tasks, and the digital reports generated as a result have also been proposed to be a critical way to help teachers deliver targeted and time-efficient teaching interventions to those who need them the most [6], [9]

Greatness of Spirit::A New Virtue for our Taxonomies?

In this paper, my aim is to present an unexplored aspect of the Arabic ethical tradition—greatness of spirit—and to assess its philosophical merit. As philosophers in this tradition approach it, greatness of spirit is essentially a virtue of moral aspiration. I consider two construals of the virtue, one as a second-order virtue, another as a virtue whose closest cousin is neo-Aristotelian emulousness. It is the latter that enables us to pick out the substantive commitments the virtue incorporates. These include its emphasis on open-ended aspiration and its self-referential elements. Having isolated these controversial features, I outline some possible defences.</jats:p

Bridging Serious Games and Participatory Design

Participatory design (PD) has become widely popular within the interaction design community, but to date has had little influence within serious game design processes. We argue that serious game design complicates the notion of involving users as co-designers, as serious game designers must be fluent with both domain content and game design. In this paper, we share our experiences of using PD during the design process of a serious game. We present observations stemming from attempts to apply the existing PD methods of brainstorming and storyboarding. Reflecting on the shortcomings of these methods, we go on to propose a novel PD method that leverages two fundamental qualities of serious games–domain expertise and procedurality–to scaffold players’ existing knowledge and make co-design of serious games an attainable goal

The role of CCI in supporting children’s engagement with environmental sustainability at a time of climate crisis

Today’s children will live life navigating the impacts of climate change triggering new questions about their environmental education and how we can prepare them to take active roles that shape our ecological futures. The aim of our paper is to reflect on the role that the Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) community can play to this end. We do this by analysing thirteen years of HCI research concerned with the application of children’s digital technology to environmental sustainability (ES). Content analysis of the 25 papers identified shows that climate change is not a motor theme, with half of the papers using ES as an application area that drives other aims. Our analysis contributes a novel research agenda proposing to expand the domains, theories and user groups researchers have thus far focused on. Examining the distinctive design properties of previous research, we advance new insights into the role technology can play for children’s ES

A Multiscale Model to Investigate Circadian Rhythmicity of Pacemaker Neurons in the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus

The suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the hypothalamus is a multicellular system that drives daily rhythms in mammalian behavior and physiology. Although the gene regulatory network that produces daily oscillations within individual neurons is well characterized, less is known about the electrophysiology of the SCN cells and how firing rate correlates with circadian gene expression. We developed a firing rate code model to incorporate known electrophysiological properties of SCN pacemaker cells, including circadian dependent changes in membrane voltage and ion conductances. Calcium dynamics were included in the model as the putative link between electrical firing and gene expression. Individual ion currents exhibited oscillatory patterns matching experimental data both in current levels and phase relationships. VIP and GABA neurotransmitters, which encode synaptic signals across the SCN, were found to play critical roles in daily oscillations of membrane excitability and gene expression. Blocking various mechanisms of intracellular calcium accumulation by simulated pharmacological agents (nimodipine, IP3- and ryanodine-blockers) reproduced experimentally observed trends in firing rate dynamics and core-clock gene transcription. The intracellular calcium concentration was shown to regulate diverse circadian processes such as firing frequency, gene expression and system periodicity. The model predicted a direct relationship between firing frequency and gene expression amplitudes, demonstrated the importance of intracellular pathways for single cell behavior and provided a novel multiscale framework which captured characteristics of the SCN at both the electrophysiological and gene regulatory levels

The role of shame, guilt and embarrassment in online social dilemmas

The self-conscious emotions of shame, guilt and embarrassment are known for regulating human societies by (1) encouraging the wrongdoer to further comply and (2) extending reparation to the one damaged. Self-awareness is a requisite for the experience of self-conscious emotions. In this paper, we hypothesise that low self-awareness online deprives an offender of the emotional consequences that usually follow a norm violation. Therefore, the aforementioned pro-social benefits of self-conscious emotions are not made possible. We test this hypothesis in a study during which online offenders were assigned to either high or low self-awareness conditions. The results show that high self-aware participants, in contrast to low self-aware participants, experience more self-conscious emotions, collaborate more when given a second opportunity and apologise more frequently