Serious Games: A playful approach to reduce usage barriers of innovative public transport systems

These days, automation, digitalization and mobile application are driving forces in the development of innovations in public transportation. Interactive digital approaches like serious games are a promising way to introduce new mobility services to the public in a contemporary manner. The trend towards a flexibilization of life- and workstyles entails a growing demand for individualized and more flexible forms of personal mobility. People no longer want to adapt their need for mobility to fixed schedules of public transport. The emergence of new mobility services that are based on reservation and payment via mobile devices, for example Car2Go (carsharing), CallaBike (bikesharing), Uber (ride sharing) or BlaBlaCar (carpooling), proves the need for demand driven mobility services. A growing flexibility can be expected to be accompanied by an increase in the inherent complexity of mobility services. This results in an increasing relevance of users’ information requirements that have to be incorporated in mobility services to enable planning and projection of routes and arrivals. An insufficient provision of information about how to use the mobility service or the absence of a transparent and understandable information environment could create usage barriers that cause a refusal of the mobility service. New mobility systems need to be systematically introduced to the prospective users. To improve users’ conceptual understanding of a new demand responsive transport system a serious game is developed by the authors. A serious game is characterized by an explicit educational purpose. The objective behind the serious game is to provide information about the operating concept of a demand responsive bus in a playful way. The underlying concept of the mobility service is introduced to the player as well as possible use cases and system constraints. To enhance knowledge about the new bus system players are put in the position of a public traffic planner. Players have the mission to plan and operate a bus system that satisfies customer needs on the one hand and meets the goal of an efficient and environmental friendly operation on the other hand. It is hypothesized that the serious game improves the conceptual understanding of the mobility service, reduces usage barriers and increases the intention to use the new bus system

PEER CREATION OF E-LEARNING MATERIALS TO ENHANCE LEARNING SUCCESS AND SATISFACTION IN AN INFORMATION SYSTEMS COURSE

Creating up-to-date high quality learning materials requires significant resources many instructors cannot afford, especially when it comes to appealing eLearning materials. Peer creation may help to address this challenge. However, existing concepts of peer learning focus mostly on enhancing active discussion and reflection. Thus far, little to no research has addressed processes of systematically creating modular, re-usable learning materials and evaluated the extent to which these materials can enrich the learning experience. To close this gap, we transferred principles of traditional peer learning onto the creation of self-contained, high quality eLearning materials: Web Based Trainings that served as an interactive script and multiple-choice tests as peer assessments. These learning materials were used in a large-scale Information Systems course. We analyzed user logs, measured learning outcomes by a pre- and post-multiple-choice test (n = 164) and evaluated learner satisfaction by an online questionnaire (n = 128). Results show a significant correlation between usage of the peer created eLearning materials and learning outcomes, as well as satisfaction. The study contributes to the pedagogical research by adapting and evaluating traditional peer learning concepts onto eLearning content creation. To practitioners, it reveals ways of creating high quality eLearning materials in spite of limited resources

Design and Evaluation of a Didactical Service Blueprinting Method For Large Scale Lectures

University instructors face strict economic constraints when designing lectures. Intelligent usage of IT and higher degrees of learner integration can help to face this challenge, but it is difficult to decide which parts of a lecture should be re-designed and how. Thus, we present the Didactical Service Blueprint (DSB), a method to analyze and re-design large scale learning services with reasonable resources by integrating eLearning and peer learning activities. We have used DSB to iteratively improve an IS-lecture over the course of four years and evaluated learning success (n = 404) and satisfaction (n = 389). Results indicate that DSB is suitable to improve lectures considering reasonable consumption of resources. As theoretical contribution, this paper offers an advancement and adaptation of the traditional Service Blueprint explicitly designed for large scale learning services. The practical contribution lies in the application of DSB to develop solutions for common problems in large courses

Chiral particle separation by a non-chiral micro-lattice

We conceived a model experiment for a continuous separation strategy of chiral molecules (enantiomers) without the need of any chiral selector structure or derivatization agents: Micro-particles that only differ by their chirality are shown to migrate along different directions when driven by a steady fluid flow through a square lattice of cylindrical posts. In accordance with our numerical predictions, the transport directions of the enantiomers depend very sensitively on the orientation of the lattice relatively to the fluid flow

A test method to assess operator safety using Closed Transfer Systems

Closed transfer systems (CTS) are devices for the contactless transfer of plant protection products (PPP) into pesticide application equipment (PAE). They are intended to protect the operator against contamination with undiluted PPP during filling of the sprayer. CTS are universal and can be mounted on a wide range of different types and sizes of PAE. They are able to transfer the PPP from container of diverse sizes, enable also partial draining and containers can be easily rinsed after complete emptying. At the moment there is no reliable information about the contribution of CTS to operator safety. For this reason a test method was established in order to compare the operator´s contamination after the dosing process using CTS and conventional filling into the PAE. Aim of the project was to quantify the dermal exposure at different parts of the operator´s body. Instead of PPP a mixture of water and a fluorescent tracer (Pyranin) was used. It was filled into 10-Litercontainers and sealed. The operator was equipped with Personal Protective Clothing which was washed after the filling process in order to determine the amount of contamination on different parts of the body by using fluorometry. The different filling processes were performed by 3 different persons with 5 repetitions per setting using an attached field crop sprayer (RAU D2) with a CTS mounted on the induction hopper and also on the dome shaft. The results show that CTS can significantly help to minimize operator exposure in comparison to conventional filling and that the test procedure established is able to fulfil the defined aims of testing CTS.Closed transfer systems (CTS) are devices for the contactless transfer of plant protection products (PPP) into pesticide application equipment (PAE). They are intended to protect the operator against contamination with undiluted PPP during filling of the sprayer. CTS are universal and can be mounted on a wide range of different types and sizes of PAE. They are able to transfer the PPP from container of diverse sizes, enable also partial draining and containers can be easily rinsed after complete emptying. At the moment there is no reliable information about the contribution of CTS to operator safety. For this reason a test method was established in order to compare the operator´s contamination after the dosing process using CTS and conventional filling into the PAE. Aim of the project was to quantify the dermal exposure at different parts of the operator´s body. Instead of PPP a mixture of water and a fluorescent tracer (Pyranin) was used. It was filled into 10-Litercontainers and sealed. The operator was equipped with Personal Protective Clothing which was washed after the filling process in order to determine the amount of contamination on different parts of the body by using fluorometry. The different filling processes were performed by 3 different persons with 5 repetitions per setting using an attached field crop sprayer (RAU D2) with a CTS mounted on the induction hopper and also on the dome shaft. The results show that CTS can significantly help to minimize operator exposure in comparison to conventional filling and that the test procedure established is able to fulfil the defined aims of testing CTS

Synergistic, Orthogonal, and Antagonistic Photochemistry for Light‐Induced 3D Printing

3D printing techniques are often based on light-induced chemical reactions, driven by the fascinating and powerful possibilities to control light in space and time. To date, these approaches are usually restricted to a single color of light, which does not do justice to light as an entire spectrum of distinct wavelengths. It is possible to further tap into the vast potential of light-induced 3D printing by introducing a second color of light. While the complexity of photochemical interactions in two-color systems is greatly increased, it concomitantly allows for enhanced control over manufacturing speed and resolution. In general, three types of two-color interactions can be distinguished, i.e., synergistic, orthogonal, and antagonistic. In recent years, intriguing printing techniques with superior potential for the fabrication of 3D structures are emerging that require two colors of light. Their future development potential is vast yet needs to be critically underpinned by an advance in complex tunable photochemical reaction systems. The current perspective will thus explore the potential for using synergistic, orthogonal, and antagonistic photochemistries in 3D printing

Multi-core Interference-Sensitive WCET Analysis Leveraging Runtime Resource Capacity Enforcement

The performance and power efficiency of multi-core processors are attractive features for safety-critical applications, as in avionics. But increased integration and average-case performance optimizations pose challenges when deploying them for such domains. In this paper we propose a novel approach to compute a interference-sensitive Worst-Case Execution Time (isWCET) considering variable accesses delays due to the concurrent use of shared resources in multi-core processors. Thereby we tackle the problem of temporal partitioning as it is required by safety-critical applications. In particular, we introduce additional phases to state-of-the-art timing analysis techniques to analyse an applications resource usage and compute an interference delay. We further complement the offline analysis with a runtime monitoring concept to enforce resource usage guarantees. The concepts are evaluated on Freescale's P4080 multi-core processor in combination with SYSGO's commercial real-time operating system PikeOS and AbsInt's timing analysis framework aiT. We abstract real applications' behavior using a representative task set of the EEMBC Autobench benchmark suite. Our results show a reduction of up to 75% of the multi-core Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET), while implementing full transparency to the temporal and functional behavior of applications, enabling the seamless integration of legacy applications