Serious games for basic learning mechanisms: reinforcing Mexican children’s gross motor skills and attention

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing - Early childhood is the most important and rapid period of development in a human life as it is a period where the maturation of the brain and the central nervous...     

Computer support for meetings: formalisms for local control?

This paper considers experience of computer supported meeting environments and decision support systems. The benefits are related to the ease with which computer images can be manipulated. The paper argues that the benefits follow from three underlying factors. Cognitive and social processes, and specific, grounded decision situations are not well understood. Acceptable computer support embeds an appropriate manipulable formalism, and avoids the temptation to try to represent social process and situations. This enables participants to construct their own local processes and representations, and then to reconstruct them as needed. The potential of such support is to encourage participants in discussions and meetings to gain greater control over the local synthetic a priori (framework, protocols and procedures) within which their work takes place.     

Board’s IQ: What makes a board smart?

The amount of investment that has been made in interactive whiteboards (IWB) in the Turkish educational system during the past several years is quite striking. This investment is part of a plan to integrate information and communication technologies (ICT) into the Turkish educational system, with the goal of increasing the qualitative and quantitative aspects of schooling. Prior to IWB investments, hundreds of thousands of computers, projectors, and printers were distributed to schools in efforts to raise a generation able to respond to the demands of the 21st century. In addition, 98% of secondary school students and 93% of primary school students were provided with Internet access via ADSL. The aim of this study is to analyze the emerging trend of smart board investment in Turkish primary and secondary schools, with consideration of problems that hinder the effective use of IWBs in classrooms as compared to previous ICT integration efforts by the Ministry of National Education. The research is designed as an evaluative case study. The required data are collected through online questionnaires, teacher and pupil interviews, and document searches from teachers and students from various Turkish primary and secondary schools. It is not surprising that the factors hindering the use of IWBs in education are similar to the inhibiting factors in previous ICT integration projects. The findings show that when the needs for in-service training, digital education materials, support, maintenance, and administration are not addressed, educational ICT is unlikely to deliver the expected results.     

Comparison of children’s gaming scores to NEPSY-II scores: Validation of computer games as cognitive tools

This exploratory quantitative study compared schoolchildren’s scores on 15 computer games to their scores on the neuropsychological test, NEPSY-II, to determine whether these games utilize predicted cognitive skills. Forty-three children aged 7–12 from different ethnic groups participated in this study. There was an almost equal split between girls and boys, some of whom reported mild learning difficulties. Many a priori predicted correlations were confirmed, with a medium to high effect. Eleven games shared their highest correlation with one or more of the predicted cognitive skills as measured by the NEPSY-II, which provided evidence that these computer games use specific cognitive functions. This suggests that similar computer games could be used to assess, practice, or monitor cognitive skills among schoolchildren.     

Is contextual animation needed in multimedia learning games for children? An eye tracker study

The present study investigates affective-motivational, attention, and learning effects of unexplored emotional design manipulation: Contextual animation (animation of contextual elements) in multimedia learning game (MLGs) for children. Participants (N = 134; M_age = 9.25; Grades 3 and 4) learned either from an experimental version of the MLG with a high amount of contextual animation or from an identical MLG with no contextual animation (control). Children strongly preferred (χ² = 87.04, p < .001) and found the experimental version more attractive (p < .001, d = −1.11). No significant differences in overall enjoyment and learning outcomes were found. Attention differences, measured by dwell times and fixation durations, were small and reached only borderline significance (p = .035; d = −0.39). The implication is that contextual animation in MLG for children increases such instructional materials' attractiveness without compromising cognitive processes needed for learning; however, it does not lead to their higher instructional efficiency.     

Tangibot: A tangible-mediated robot to support cognitive games for ageing people—A usability study

The ever increasing elderly population requires a revision of technology to make it usable and meaningful for them. Most applications take into account their reduced physical and cognitive abilities in order to provide assistive services, but this paper focuses on building technology to improve these capacities through cognitive games. We present Tangibot, a tangible-mediated robot aimed at enabling more intuitive and appealing interactions. A usability study conducted on subjects at three different levels of cognitive impairment (none, mild, and severe) reveals that it is usable and engaging for users with no or mild cognitive impairment, and even though it is less usable for persons with severe impairment, it triggers positive emotional reactions among them, which makes it promising for their use in therapeutic activities.     

What is the difference? A cognitive dissimilarity measure for information retrieval result sets

Result rankings from context-aware information retrieval are inherently dynamic, as the same query can lead to significantly different outcomes in different contexts. For example, the search term Digital Camera will lead to different—albeit potentially overlapping—results in the contexts customer reviews and shops, respectively. The comparison of such result rankings can provide useful insights into the effects of context changes on the information retrieval results. In particular, the impact of single aspects of the context in complex applications can be analyzed to identify the most (and least) influential context parameters. While a multitude of methods exists for assessing the relevance of a result ranking with respect to a given query, the question how different two result rankings are from a user’s point of view has not been tackled so far. This paper introduces DIR, a cognitively plausible dissimilarity measure for information retrieval result sets that is based solely on the results and thus applicable independently of the retrieval method. Unlike statistical correlation measures, this dissimilarity measure reflects how human users quantify the changes in information retrieval result rankings. The DIR measure supports cognitive engineering tasks for information retrieval, such as work flow and interface design: using the measure, developers can identify which aspects of context heavily influence the outcome of the retrieval task and should therefore be in the focus of the user’s interaction with the system. The cognitive plausibility of DIR has been evaluated in two human participants tests, which demonstrate a strong correlation with user judgments.     

What makes the difference? An empirical comparison of fusion strategies for multimodal language analysis

Multimodal video sentiment analysis is a rapidly growing area. It combines verbal (i.e., linguistic) and non-verbal modalities (i.e., visual, acoustic) to predict the sentiment of utterances. A recent trend has been geared towards different modality fusion models utilizing various attention, memory and recurrent components. However, there lacks a systematic investigation on how these different components contribute to solving the problem as well as their limitations. This paper aims to fill the gap, marking the following key innovations. We present the first large-scale and comprehensive empirical comparison of eleven state-of-the-art (SOTA) modality fusion approaches in two video sentiment analysis tasks, with three SOTA benchmark corpora. An in-depth analysis of the results shows that the attention mechanisms are the most effective for modelling crossmodal interactions, yet they are computationally expensive. Second, additional levels of crossmodal interaction decrease performance. Third, positive sentiment utterances are the most challenging cases for all approaches. Finally, integrating context and utilizing the linguistic modality as a pivot for non-verbal modalities improve performance. We expect that the findings would provide helpful insights and guidance to the development of more effective modality fusion models.     

Computerized working memory training: Can it lead to gains in cognitive skills in students?

Given that working memory is an important cognitive skill that is linked to academic success, there is increasing attention given to exploring ways to support working memory problems in struggling students. One promising approach is computerized training, and the aim of the present study focused on whether computerized working memory training could result in both near and far transfer training effects; and whether such effects would be maintained over time. Students were allocated into one of three groups: Nonactive Control, Active Control, where they trained once a week (WMT-Low frequency); Training group, where they trained four times a week (WMT-High frequency). All three groups were tested on measures of working memory, verbal and nonverbal ability, and academic attainment before training; and re-tested on the same measures after training, as well as 8 months later. The data indicate gains in both verbal and visuo-spatial working memory tasks for the high-frequency Training group. Improvements were also evidenced in tests of verbal and nonverbal ability tests, as well as spelling, in the high-frequency Training group. There were some maintenance effects when students were tested 8 months later. Possible reasons for why the computerized working memory training led to some far transfer effects in the high-frequency Training group are included in the discussion.     

Improving the information society skills: Is knowledge accessible for all?

Universal Access in the Information Society - The emergence and popularization of information and communications technologies (ICT) is changing modern society and its educational landscape. ICT...     

What type of content are smartphone users addicted to?: SNS vs. games

Based on a sample of 944 respondents who were recruited from 20 elementary schools in South Korea, this research surveyed the factors that lead to smartphone addiction. This research examined the user characteristics and media content types that can lead to addiction. With regard to user characteristics, results showed that those who have lower self-control and those who have greater stress were more likely to be addicted to smartphones. For media content types, those who use smartphones for SNS, games, and entertainment were more likely to be addicted to smartphones, whereas those who use smartphones for study-related purposes were not. Although both SNS use and game use were positive predictors of smartphone addiction, SNS use was a stronger predictor of smartphone addiction than game use.     

Information society skills: Is knowledge accessible for all? Part I

Universal Access in the Information Society -     

A Computational Conundrum: “What is a Computer?” A Historical Overview

This introduction begins by posing the question that this Special Issue addresses and briefly considers historical precedents and why the issue is important. The discussion then moves on to the consideration of important milestones in the history of computing, up until the present time. A brief specification of the essential components of computational systems is then offered. The final section introduces the papers that are included in this volume.     

What makes them happy and curious online? An empirical study on high school students’ Internet use from a self-determination theory perspective

From a self-determination theory perspective, this study tries to investigate how perceived autonomy support, perceived relatedness and competence affect high school students’ intrinsic motivations (enjoyment and curiosity) to use the Internet, and the related outcomes of the motivation. Surveys are distributed to seven junior and ten senior high schools in a prefectural-level city in central China. Existing instruments from previous research are adapted to measure the following constructs: teacher support, parental support, peer influence, Internet self-efficacy, enjoyment, curiosity, flow state and online exploratory behavior. Finally, 3475 valid responses are collected.     

Computer games created by middle school girls: Can they be used to measure understanding of computer science concepts?

Computer game programming has been touted as a promising strategy for engaging children in the kinds of thinking that will prepare them to be producers, not just users of technology. But little is known about what they learn when programming a game. In this article, we present a strategy for coding student games, and summarize the results of an analysis of 108 games created by middle school girls using Stagecast Creator in an after school class. The findings show that students engaged in moderate levels of complex programming activity, created games with moderate levels of usability, and that the games were characterized by low levels of code organization and documentation. These results provide evidence that game construction involving both design and programming activities can support the learning of computer science concepts.     

Deep Nets: What have They Ever Done for Vision?

International Journal of Computer Vision - This is an opinion paper about the strengths and weaknesses of Deep Nets for vision. They are at the heart of the enormous recent progress in artificial...     

Explicit versus implicit models: What are good languages for modeling?

Software and Systems Modeling -