Simulation Games for Education: "Fold it" Solve Puzzles for Science

     The game that I chose was inspired by my son who is somewhat of a muscle head who continuously talks about the importance of getting the right amount of protein in order to build lean mass!

       Okay, that’s all well and good. However, what does he really know about the protein that he  trying to ingest on a daily basis? Does he even have a clue what the body does with protein in general? Well, the answer is "no" because knowing what protein is and what the body uses it for can become complicated and quite specialized. 

     The game called “foldit” (Solve Puzzles for Science) is in some ways a bit advanced and specific to perhaps a biology major but regardless of who plays it the player cannot help but learn the basics of how the body uses protein and its many different forms.

       This type of game can teach a youngster that is into sports and muscle training is that not all proteins are alike and buying into the hype of some manufacturer of a supplement product is not necessarily going to benefit their quest for muscle, health and fitness. However, the education gained from this type of game inevitably will.
       Lastly, you never know ~ The player of the game may fold the simulated protein into the next cure for Alzheimer’s because actual scientists observe the puzzle folds that the humans players  make and see if they can apply the configuration to an actual treatment or cure for a disease such as, HIV/AIDS, certain cancers or even Alzheimer’s.

http://fold.it/portal/info/science#whygame

Virtual Driving Game: Teaches Teens with ASD to Drive?

       The game I would like to discuss is designed to help those with ASD learn to drive! Imagine that… Now people with ASD are considered to be on a spectrum for a reason and one of the reasons is the diversity of characteristics each individual may demonstrate. Therefore, some are considered very high functioning and some are not. However, the principal behind a virtual game is the same for all those on the spectrum and that is to begin to acquire a skill in the virtual world that can be transcended into the real world.

       The particular game that I am referring to in this post was created by Nilanjan Sarkar, a mechanical engineer at Vanderbilt University. His project was published in the Journal of Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems. The full article related to his project can be read by using the link at the bottom of the post.

       The game is basically designed to help those with ASD improve their rapid reaction skills. Now, at this point no really expects most people with ASD to get behind the wheel of a vehicle and drive it through town because even though most towns are not exactly “Manhattan” they are still filled with uncertainty and seemingly endless distractions that demand immediate reaction that is fairly accurate and filled with proper judgment.

       However, in a virtual world there isn’t anything in the real world that can be damaged but the learning and emotional response can be made similar to real life situations. Therefore, the virtual game becomes the starting point or the platform for future learning. Sakar said, “His lab’s games are only part of the equation, but potentially an important start.”

       The article mentions a young man from Nashville named Sam. Sam played the game for approximately a year or so and is now taking drivers education. Sam is going to begin the transition process of merging the virtual with the actual…

Reference:

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2900000/2892636/a3-wade.pdf?ip=173.62.18.137&id=2892636&acc=CHORUS&key=4D4702B0C3E38B35%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35%2E6D218144511F3437&CFID=918538308&CFTOKEN=74618297&__acm__=1491012721_cd78178e328c9367b98f9e0996779a62

Week 10 Interview: Adolescent and Social Media

This interview was with a fourteen-year-old young lady named Stephanie. Stephanie did not personally spend too much time using social media but did know enough about it too have an insightful and extensive opinion. 

Q1. What does social media mean to you?

Stephanie: Social media is a place where you share photos and experiences with people you mainly do not know. I mean your real friends are there as well but many of the people in the site are strangers.

Q2. If you were going to use social media which site do you think you would use and what would you put on the site?

Stephanie: I would use Facebook because it is easy to use and I would post mainly pictures.

Q3. What kind of pictures? Would that be pictures of yourself?

Stephanie: Well, I know that you can keep the page private where only certain people can see you such as close friends and I would post pictures of myself. Otherwise I would post mostly pictures that I like but have no direct reference to me.

Q4. Do you have friends that use social media?

Stephanie: Yes, I have friends that use social media, my older brother uses social media and even my mother uses social media. My mother actually uses it daily and spends a good deal of time staring at her iPhone viewing Facebook. She likes to see the political comments.

Q5. Do you think social media makes people more connected to each other?

Stephanie: Not really. I mean it could seem that way but it seems to me that your not really connecting with another person on a personal or intimate level. Your mostly just posting stuff that’ often not that important.

Q6. Do you think social media could have a negative effect?

Stephanie: Yes. It can be used to hurt people if it is used for bullying and thing like that.

Q7. Is social media used in your school and if so how is it used?

Stephanie: In my school, it isn’t used too much. There is one English teacher that tries to encourage it though. She would like us to share homework assignments and perhaps support each other if we need help but it is optional and I do not participate. 

In a sense, I guess Stephanie is a bit of an anomaly because she is certainly growing up in a digital world and does know about it but at the same she is not enveloped by it. I asked her one last question. 

Q8. Do you think you’ll ever use more social media?

Stephanie: Yes, if there is a more a specific reason for it such as planning an event, especially one that’s inviting many people or perhaps to announce the opening of a new business. I think social media is great for things like that but as for communicating I would rather communicate with my friends face to face on the phone. I especially like Facetime!

Week 8 Journal Post

Annotated Bibliography

Kandalaft, M. R., Didehbani, N., Krawczyk, D. C., Allen, T. T., & Chapman, S. B. (2012). Virtual Reality Social Cognition Training for Young Adults with High-Functioning Autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders,43(1), 34-44. doi:10.1007/s10803-012-1544-6

The article focuses on young adults with high functioning autism. The purpose of the study is to enhance social skills, social cognition and social functioning. The participants are immersed into virtual environments that resemble people in their immediate reality and given the opportunity to engage and interact. 

Greffou, S., Bertone, A., Hahler, E., Hanssens, J., Mottron, L., & Faubert, J. (2011). Postural Hypo-Reactivity in Autism is Contingent on Development and Visual Environment: A Fully Immersive Virtual Reality Study. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders,42(6), 961-970. doi:10.1007/s10803-011-1326-6

The study uses VE to measure the bodily movement of ASD participants in reaction to stimuli such as: CAVE which is an 8 x 8 x 8 feet room including three walls and a floor that serve as surfaces for the projection of images. The images coupled with sound effected the bodily movement of the participants. Thus, helping the researchers better understand how the autistic brain processes image and sound in relation to motor movement

  

Bekele, E., Crittendon, J., Zheng, Z., Swanson, A., Weitlauf, A., Warren, Z., & Sarkar, N. (2014). Assessing the Utility of a Virtual Environment for Enhancing Facial Affect Recognition in Adolescents with Autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders,44(7), 1641-1650. doi:10.1007/s10803-014-2035-8

The article is focused on presenting an avatar to adolescents with ASD and giving the avatar facial expressions that express different levels of emotions. The purpose of the study is to have the ASD learner identify the meaning of the facial expression and to further understand the way in which information is processed in a brain with ASD.

  

Lahiri, U., Bekele, E., Dohrmann, E., Warren, Z., & Sarkar, N. (2014). A Physiologically Informed Virtual Reality Based Social Communication System for Individuals with Autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders,45(4), 919-931. doi:10.1007/s10803-014-2240-5

This study focused on conversation skills. It uses virtual environments to engage the ASD participant with conversation. The researchers monitored the physiological responses of the participants such as, pupil dilation, blink rate, and gaze pattern. Based on the participant’s reaction the conversations were modified to further enhance the performance of the participants. The study demonstrated that virtual environments that reacted to physiological changes in the ASD learner could be an effective developmental intervention tool for person’s with ASD.

Rajendran, G. (2013). Virtual environments and autism: a developmental psychopathological approach. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning,29(4), 334-347. doi:10.1111/jcal.12006

The article discusses how people with autism often have trouble with the obtainment and understanding of information and communication technology. Therefore, the author of the paper argues that virtual realities (VR) or virtual environments (VE) are an ideal learning platform for those with autism. The author argues that this technique not only helps the autistic person learn specific skills it also helps the autistic person be more part of an age filled with technology.

Week Three Journal Post

"Multimodal Composition" is this a pedagogy worth exploring?

In the text A New Literacies Reader Edited by C. Lankshear and M. Knobel, 2013 chapter one discusses "Multimodal Play," which at first glance sounds like a video game but it's actually far more. Multimodal play refers to the use of multiple models or instruments used to communicate creative expressions and ideas. 

The composer can mix and lace together if you will text, sound and image in order to convey ones thoughts. This kind of communication is interesting to me because just as it states in the text, "multimodal approach allows educators and researchers to attend to all of the resources involved in composing" (Lankshear & Knobel,2013). This says so much about exploration and discovery. However, not just exploration and discovery of clever and creative ways to use multimodalities but more importantly the exploration of the persons and minds doing the creating and the discovery of aptitudes and talents. 

For instance, lets say a student has difficulty expressing ones thoughts clearly with the written word but is excellent with artistic. The multimodal approach in this case can help the student place a higher emphasis on imagery while underscoring the images with short word phrases thus allowing the student to utilize more of their natural talent or aptitude rather than being stunted by the one modality that they struggle with. 


Reference: 

Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2013). A new literacies reader: educational perspectives. New York: Peter Lang.







 

Week Two Joural Post

“What counts as literacy, how literacy changes in response to the new media landscape, and what value we should ascribe to the new forms of communication that continue to emerge and evolve online (Jenkins, 2009)."

The above quote consists of only three simple phrases but one cannot adequately respond to them with three simple sentences. However, in order to keep in line with online etiquette I will keep it short and to the point. The first phrase states, “What counts as literacy?” Well, Webster’s Dictionary defines literacy as, the ability to read and write. Now, based on that definition than anyone who can read and write “anything” should be considered literate and reading their content should then enhance the literacy of the reader. Right! Okay, so that’s not going to work. 

Content, in my opinion, in order to count as literacy needs to have a level of quality that expresses an author’s legitimate perspective and at the same time keeps in mind the audience or the readers of the content. We always need to remember that everything we write influences another to a certain degree, sometimes a little and sometimes a lot, but nevertheless something happens in the brain of the reader/viewer every time they view a page filled with content. Therefore, there is a level of responsibility on the part of the author, as far as, what is being written, why it is being written and to whom they are writing to in order for it to be considered literacy worth reading. 

In response to the second phrase, “How literacy changes in response to the new media landscape.” Well, to say the least it has it has its own cultural aspects and it is certainly evolving. In one way, it appears to be a much broader way of communicating one’s thoughts to a reader however, I don’t think this is the case. I feel instead, that it has its own nature and available tools and the way in which authors manipulate and configure those tools determine whether the content can or should be considered “literacy” or not. 

An example of this could be a blog post laced with internet marketing strategies such as, too many key word phrases or highlighted words with embedded links in the middle of too many sentences continuously opining up into “Ads” or even worse taking the reader to a different window altogether. Now, this could be considered quite clever and in a sense “broad” in its reach of information but it is certainly not enhancing the insight, imagination and overall “literacy” of the exposed reader. 

However, this same method can be used to do just that if the key word phrases and links are directly related to the content and lead the reader to gain further understanding of what they are already reading which leads me to the last phrase in the quote, “What value we should ascribe to the new forms of communication that continue to emerge and evolve online.” My opinion here is that we should ascribe “tremendous” value to these forms of communication for numerous reasons. One of which, is because it is a form of communication that is being used by millions of human persons all over the world and for me that is enough to repeat what I stated earlier that we need to be responsible with the content that we send into cyberspace because that space is filled with readers that inevitably become learners.

Week One Journal Post

"The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives" (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9).

In response to the above quote many thoughts comes to mind. There are so many ways to respond to such a statement. However, because I have not read the content that came before and after the quote I am not going to worry about taking it out of context and thus apply my own opinion while correlating it to comments made by Gunther Kress in his article: The Profound Shift in Digital Literacies. 
 

Gunther discusses changes in literary form that spring from creative computer programming. He said, "Texts are becoming intensely multi-modal, that is, image is ever-increasingly appearing with writing, and, in many domains of communication, displacing writing where it had previously been dominant" (Gunther). 

In other words, we no longer need to use “Only” words. We can now enhance a short phrase with a correlating image or input a short video that relates to our topic. We can more easily increase the size of a font or even its shape and color effortlessly. This type of enhancement was impossible for the average person just several decades ago. 

He goes on to say and I personally found this statement to be most interesting. He said, "Constellations of mode and medium are being transformed. The medium of the book and the mode of writing had formed a centuries-long symbiotic constellation; this is being displaced by a new constellation of medium of the screen and mode of image. The consequences of this shift are profound" (Gunther).

What I hear Gunther saying is that an entirely new language is emerging due to the technology available for communication. It’s not that the use of symbol, picture or screen play presentation is anything new because from the Ancient Egyptians to twentieth century Hollywood every possible form of communication device known to man has been used and used again. However, never has it been at the fingertips of the everyday person (both young and old alike) 24 hours a day 7 days a week and the everyday people have a way of communicating that is quite often a bit outside of what would be considered conventional and orthodox. 

What I mean to say is for centuries communication through the written word and imagery, especially words and images that reached the masses, were left to fairly small sects of professionals and scholars but today anyone can publish a blog and start chatting about what’s on “Their mind” and if the site is marketed properly have quite a few viewers read and review their content. That can be scary! 

So, getting back to the quote and the section that said, the ways in which it involves sensitive attention to what people are doing with texts and how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives" (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9). This is of course extremely important and in my opinion a high responsibility for the writer of the content. For instance, a blogger has a responsibility to write content that is not only applicable to the topic of the day but to be sure that it is written with a certain level of clarity, purpose and dignity. 

The content whether it is solely made up of the written word or imbedded with images and video needs to express the opinion of the writer (Blogger) and at the same time leave room for intelligent and insightful comment. It should not be a mindless ramble of junk designed to excite or infuriates a reader, which prompts them to shoot back an irrational comment that results in a buzz and cheap traffic.  

It is a great privilege to be able to use the new literacies as we do. Using the internet for social communication is extraordinary and also a quite profitable for certain companies. However, in my opinion we need to stay aware of this privilege and remember to also try to express ourselves with intelligence and personal insight that is never detached from sound reason and to continuously demonstrate respect for those who view our content who inevitably after reading our words in a sense become learners. Our words are powerful and always influential.

Reference:

Kress, G., & H. (n.d.). The Profound Shift of Digital Literacies. Retrieved January 19, 2017, from http://www.academia.edu/19277890/Digital_Literacies._A_research_briefing_by_the_technology_enhanced_learning_phase_of_the_teaching_and_learning_research_programme