Students' experience with online simulation games: From computer anxiety to satisfaction

It is currently of great importance to analyse the experience of the application of new technologies in teaching. This research paper examines the personality traits of students and their environment, which may influence the experience of college students using online simulation games. Previous literature suggests that individuals may feel anxiety when using the computer, which may vary according to their perception of being able to control the situation, their perceived importance of the activities and any prior knowledge that they have. Therefore, the first objective of this research is to analyse the relationship between computer anxiety, locus of control and perceived importance of the computer activities. The second objective is to examine whether this relationship is moderated by knowledge. The third objective is to identify user clusters to examine which factors are most important to explain user satisfaction with online simulation games. Results showed that students experience greater computer anxiety when the situation is perceived as important and the locus of control is high, being these effects moderated by their previous knowledge. Moreover, a cluster analysis threw light on the existence of cluster of users whose satisfaction mainly depends on their game score. These results have implications for both academic and research purposes

Microstructure-based material model for thermo-mechanical fatigue of cylinder heads

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Are Performance Audits Useful? A Comparison of EU Practices

Performance audits allow audit institutions to contribute to the improvement of the economy, efficiency, and/or effectiveness of public sector entities through the recommendations of their reports. To assess the impact of the performance audits carried out by EU Supreme and Regional Audit Institutions, this article analyzes whether these recommendations are implemented in practice or not. The results show that there are two main ways in which the recommendations included in the performance audit reports produce an impact: the Anglo-American way, based on auditee actions and follow-up processes, and the Germanic way, based on parliamentary action

Testing the Reliability of Financial Sustainability. The Case of Spanish Local Governments

Local Governments (LGs) have strengthened the financial control as a consequence of mandatory requirements to ensure financial sustainability in their management. The aim of this study is to determine whether financial indicators about financial conditions defined in Spanish regulation are backed by worldwide generally accepted financial benchmarking indicators. For this purpose, we analyze the relationship between Spanish indicators of financial sustainability based on European Union (EU) regulations and Financial Trends Monitoring System Indicators (FTMS) of the International City/County Management Association (ICMA). For this purpose, two methodologies are applied: discriminant analysis and logistic regression, where the dependent variables are each of the Spanish financial indicators and the independent variables are ICMA indicators. The evidence supports that variables that are related to the control of expenditures, debt and the revenues show a greater explanatory power of financial sustainability, being the most important elements which offer relevant information about the financial sustainability measurement of LGs

Comparing online with offline citizen engagement for climate change: findings from Austria, Germany and Spain

The aim of this paper is to study the expectations of environmental senior managers, as experts in this field, about the effect of e-participation in the fight against climate change. Their experiences in, and the fulfillment of their expectations about, citizen participation in local government environmental programs have been analyzed through different questionnaires in order to answer the following research questions. What effects can be expected from citizen participation in environmental programs? What conditions are necessary for, and what barriers are there to, successful participation processes? Is e-participation more effective than traditional citizen participation? The results confirm that e-participation is only an enabler of citizen engagement in participation processes, but it does not overcome all the barriers to these processes. The success of citizen participation cannot be guaranteed merely by introducing ICTs. The integration of e-participation with traditional offline tools for citizen participation is needed

Optimization of baffle configurations to prevent aeroacoustic instabilities in heat exchangers - preliminary experiments

It is well known that gas heat exchangers are prone to aeroacoustic instabilities, which often lead to severe noise levels, structural vibrations and fatigue. These are unacceptable, as they threaten the component integrity and expose the plant workers to excessive noise levels. Such phenomenon is due to a cooperative interplay between the Karman vortices generated by the cross-flow and the heat exchanger acoustical modes (mainly those transverse to the tube banks). Energy exchanges are then such that, for certain operating velocities, self-excitation of one or more acoustical modes arises. Actually, this problem is solved by placing rigid baffles inside the container, which modify the acoustic modal fields and eventually inhibit the instability. However, an effective location of such baffles is more or less difficult depending on the system complexity and on the range of flow velocities of interest. For realistic industrial components - using a restricted number of acoustical baffles - their optimal location is a challenging problem, as trial and error experimentation is often a costly and frustrating procedure. In this paper we improve a recently proposed strategy for the optimal location of a given number of baffles, in order to inhibit instability of the acoustical modes in a given frequency range. Our approach is based on a stochastic global optimization technique. Some preliminary experiments are also performed and compared with the simulation results