Designing Effective Simulation Games for Active Learning in Systems Engineering

Simulation games have been an effective method of teaching, especially for Systems Engineering concepts. The hands-on activities facilitate active, experiential, and collaborative learning with fun elements. Many simulation games have been developed in the past, but not all are equally effective. How to design a simulation game that is effective and easy to implement? This paper attempts to identify the key design factors that affect the performance of simulation games for teaching systems engineering concepts. By reviewing designs of several existing simulation games, important design factors were identified and verified. With these factors, a more effective way to design new simulation games has been suggested.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Contribution of simulation and gaming to natural resource management issues: An introduction

Nowadays, computer-mediated simulations and games are widely used in the field of natural resource management (NRM). They have proved to be useful for various purposes such as supporting decisionmaking processes and training. First, the specificities of the NRM research field are highlighted. Then, based on the analysis of the articles presented in this special issue of Simulation & Gaming, some key features related to the implementation of gaming in such a context are introduced. Finally, after reviewing the benefits of using simulation games in NRM, the authors stress the ethical issue of changing social relationships among stakeholders by playing a game with some of themGESTION DE L'ENVIRONNEMENT;RESSOURCE NATURELLE;SIMULATION;SOCIOLOGIE;JEU DE ROLE;BENEFITS;CONTEXT;COLLECTIVE POLICY DESIGN;DECISION MAKING;ETHICAL ISSUES;IMPLEMENTATION;NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT (NRM);SIMULATION GAMES;SOCIAL EMPOWERMENT;SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS;SOCIOECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS;STAKEHOLDERS

Portfolio Construction in Global Financial Markets

This paper presents a classroom simulation that can be used to introduce the concepts of portfolio management and asset allocation in the presence of global markets. While there are portfolio management games and stock trading games that are designed to cover an entire semester, this simulation provides a single period introduction to portfolio management. The simulation also creates an environment in which students discover how exchange rate volatility can affect investment returns of global funds.

Future Trends of Virtual, Augmented Reality, and Games for Health

Serious game is now a multi-billion dollar industry and is still growing steadily in many sectors. As a major subset of serious games, designing and developing Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and serious games or adopting off-the-shelf games to support medical education, rehabilitation, or promote health has become a promising frontier in the healthcare sector since 2004, because games technology is inexpensive, widely available, fun and entertaining for people of all ages, with various health conditions and different sensory, motor, and cognitive capabilities. In this chapter, we provide the reader an overview of the book with a perspective of future trends of VR, AR simulation and serious games for healthcare

Buffered Simulation Games for B\"uchi Automata

Simulation relations are an important tool in automata theory because they provide efficiently computable approximations to language inclusion. In recent years, extensions of ordinary simulations have been studied, for instance multi-pebble and multi-letter simulations which yield better approximations and are still polynomial-time computable. In this paper we study the limitations of approximating language inclusion in this way: we introduce a natural extension of multi-letter simulations called buffered simulations. They are based on a simulation game in which the two players share a FIFO buffer of unbounded size. We consider two variants of these buffered games called continuous and look-ahead simulation which differ in how elements can be removed from the FIFO buffer. We show that look-ahead simulation, the simpler one, is already PSPACE-hard, i.e. computationally as hard as language inclusion itself. Continuous simulation is even EXPTIME-hard. We also provide matching upper bounds for solving these games with infinite state spaces.Comment: In Proceedings AFL 2014, arXiv:1405.527

Research and education in management of large- scale technical programs Semiannual progress report, 1 Jan. - 30 Jun. 1970

Development and implementation of programs related to urban simulation games and decision making exercises for action researc

Environmental designs:a typology towards an expanded field

In this paper we offer a provisional typology of the primary categories of environmental or ecological relationships depicted, represented or simulated in games. We explore four main approaches to environments in games: environment as backdrop, as resource, as antagonist, and as text. These four provisional types are not clearly delineated, or equally common amongst all games and game genres, nor are they mutually exclusive within particular games. We argue that consideration of ecological notions in gaming reveals their frequent subordination to higher level game design decisions, and that analysis through this typology can reveal the shifting relationships between technologies of simulation and videogame strategies of representation – as well as orient game design towards the possibility for more expansive thinking about environmental relations (and hence, the most significant political issues of our time) as seen in the work of scholars such as Timothy Morton

Parity Game Reductions

Parity games play a central role in model checking and satisfiability checking. Solving parity games is computationally expensive, among others due to the size of the games, which, for model checking problems, can easily contain $10^9$ vertices or beyond. Equivalence relations can be used to reduce the size of a parity game, thereby potentially alleviating part of the computational burden. We reconsider (governed) bisimulation and (governed) stuttering bisimulation, and we give detailed proofs that these relations are equivalences, have unique quotients and they approximate the winning regions of parity games. Furthermore, we present game-based characterisations of these relations. Using these characterisations our equivalences are compared to relations for parity games that can be found in the literature, such as direct simulation equivalence and delayed simulation equivalence. To complete the overview we develop coinductive characterisations of direct- and delayed simulation equivalence and we establish a lattice of equivalences for parity games

Multistage Voting Model with Alternative Elimination

The voting process is formalized as a multistage voting model with successive alternative elimination. A finite number of agents vote for one of the alternatives each round subject to their preferences. If the number of votes given to the alternative is less than a threshold, it gets eliminated from the game. A special subclass of repeated games that always stop after a finite number of stages is considered. Threshold updating rule is proposed. A computer simulation is used to illustrate two properties of these voting games