4,414 research outputs found
Towards a Lightweight Approach for Modding Serious Educational Games: Assisting Novice Designers
Serious educational games (SEGs) are a growing segment of the education community’s pedagogical toolbox. Effectively creating such games remains challenging, as teachers and industry trainers are content experts; typically they are not game designers with the theoretical knowledge and practical experience needed to create a quality SEG. Here, a lightweight approach to interactively explore and modify existing SEGs is introduced, a toll that can be broadly adopted by educators for pedagogically sound SEGs. Novice game designers can rapidly explore the educational and traditional elements of a game, with a stress on tracking the SEG learning objectives, as well as allowing for reviewing and altering a variety of graphic and audio game elements
The host galaxies of strong CaII QSO absorption systems at z<0.5
We present new imaging and spectroscopic observations of the fields of five
QSOs with very strong intervening CaII absorption systems at redshifts z<0.5
selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Recent studies of these very rare
absorbers indicate that they may be related to damped Lyman alpha systems
(DLAs). In all five cases we identify a galaxy at the redshift of the CaII
system with impact parameters up to ~24 kpc. In four out of five cases the
galaxies are luminous (L ~L*), metal-rich (Z ~Zsun), massive (velocity
dispersion, sigma ~100 km/s) spirals. Their star formation rates, deduced from
Halpha emission, are high, in the range SFR = 0.3 - 30 Msun/yr. In our
analysis, we paid particular attention to correcting the observed emission line
fluxes for stellar absorption and dust extinction. We show that these effects
are important for a correct SFR estimate; their neglect in previous low-z
studies of DLA-selected galaxies has probably led to an underestimate of the
star formation activity in at least some DLA hosts. We discuss possible links
between CaII-selected galaxies and DLAs and outline future observations which
will help clarify the relationship between these different classes of QSO
absorbers.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS, 14 pages, 9 figures. Version with
full resolution images available at
http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~bjz/papers/Zych_etal_2007a.pd
A galaxy as the source of a Civ absorption system close to the epoch of reionization
We find a bright (L_{UV}=2.5 L*_{z=6}) Lyman alpha emitter at redshift
z=5.719 at a projected distance of 79 physical kpc from a strong triply ionized
carbon (Civ) absorption system at redshift z=5.7238 previously reported in the
spectrum of the z_{em} = 6.309 QSO SDSS J1030+0524. This is the highest
redshift galaxy-absorber pair detected to-date, supporting the idea that
galaxy-wide outflows were already in place at the end of the epoch of
reionization. The proximity of this object makes it the most likely source of
metals, consistent with models of outflows at lower redshift where significant
observational evidence relates metal absorption systems with galaxies hosting
outflows.
In a typical outflow scenario, a wind of 200 km/s, active since the universe
was only 0.6 Gyr old (z ~8.4), could eject metals out to 79 kpc at z=5.719.
Although the origin of metals in the intergalactic medium (IGM) is still under
debate, our results are consistent with predictions from cosmological
simulations which reproduce the evolution of the cosmic density of Civ, from z
~ 6 to the present day based on outflow-driven enrichment of the IGM.
We also report two more Lyman alpha emitters in this field, at z=5.973\pm
0.002 and z=5.676\pm 0.002 respectively, the former confirming the original
identification by Stiavelli et al. Our results suggest that the colour cut
typically used to identify i-dropouts (i_{775}-z_{850}>1.3) misses a
non-negligible fraction of blue galaxies with faint UV continuum at z \geq 5.7.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS, 9 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl
Area of comfort: Russian language training for Vietnamese students at technical university
The paper focuses on the psychological and pedagogical peculiarities of teaching Russian to students from Vietnam. The methodology approach taken in this study is motivated by ideas of active Learning articulated by Verbitcky and the Motivation theory developed by Maslow and Yakimanskaya. The methodological basis of the research is a student-centered learning approach. The author provides a theoretical framework based on the communicative competence concept elaborated by Viatiutnev in area of theory and methods Russian as foreign language. Our qualitative methodology included interviews with students, review of documents and analysis of educational results. The authors use Smekal and Kucher’s Questionnaire to identify psychological characteristics of Vietnamese students and offer a solution to the problem of effective teaching with due consideration of the students’ cultural features. The authors present the research findings on the personality orientation of Vietnamese students enrolled in National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University. In general, we systematize suggestions for Russian Language teachers who work with international students from Vietnam
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