Use of gamification to enhance curiosity and engagement through feedback strategies

Curiosity is a significant educational component behind human learning and is vital for a learner to sustain motivation and engagement in both face-to-face and online learning environments. Positive feedback has the potential to support learning by enhancing competence, confidence, and curiosity. Informative feedback at the right time is the sought-after goal in traditional classrooms and is equally important for the learning design within a digital educational environment. Individual differences such as personality, gender, learning style, and curiosity trait can play a crucial role in how feedback is received and acquired knowledge is demonstrated in a different context by a learner. This paper proposes to exploit the benefits of positive feedback in a statistics game by establishing a connection between feedback and curiosity through the lens of the selfdetermination theory of motivation. It presents a work-in-progress psychological theory-based conceptual framework to foster curiosity by means of game-based learning and gamification approaches.

The Processing of Visual Signals in Major Depressive Disorder

The balanced processing of the internal mental world and the external world is a crucial aspect of everyday well-being. An extensive control of the internal emotional and cognitive world that often results in an internal expression of distress is a common feature of internalizing disorders. However, how depression affects the processing of the external world is still an open question. We, therefore, tested the processing of visual signals in major depressive disorder (MDD). To this end, we recorded the electroencephalogram of 38 MDD patients and 38 controls, while they performed a response-choice task with informative feedback and a passive viewing task. MDD patients differed significantly from controls in the early information processing of visual stimuli. The vertex positive potential (VPP) evoked by feedback in the response-choice task and pictures in the passive viewing task were smaller in MDD patients than in controls. This outcome suggests that depression might subtract attentional resources from external signal processing, with potential consequences in various cognitive domains.

Sustainable Development of Students’ Learning Capabilities: The Case of University Students’ Attitudes towards Teachers, Peers, and Themselves as Oral Feedback Sources in Learning English

In order to promote the sustainable development of students’ learning capabilities, students are expected to take an active role in the feedback process. Ideally, students should not only actively interpret and act on the feedback received from their teachers, but they should also serve as feedback generators for their peers and themselves. Our study aimed to explore Chinese university English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) students’ perceptions of the feedback practices in their classrooms and their feelings about teacher feedback, peer review and self-review as credible feedback sources. Adopting a qualitative research design, we recruited three teachers together with seven to eight of their students (in total 23 students) from two universities in Northwest China. Data were collected by using focus group interviews and classroom observations. Findings indicated that students relied on teachers to provide informative feedback to help them progress. They also attached limited value to either peer or self-review. Our interview data revealed three possible reasons for students’ devaluation of peers and themselves as feedback sources: insufficient understanding of students’ roles and responsibilities in the feedback process, perceived limited capability and capacity to generate quality feedback; and affective and relational concerns if engaging in the feedback process. These findings highlight the need for teachers to foster student feedback literacy, and hence help them utilize different feedback sources to enhance their learning and sustainable development.

Diagnostics of semiconductor structures by electrochemical capacitance-voltage profiling technique

The properties of interfaces in the heterostructures which frequently govern their operation are of particular importance for the devices containing heterostructures as active elements. Any further improving of the characteristics of semiconductor devices is impossible without a detail analysis of the processes occurring at the interfaces of heterojunctions. At the same time, the results largely depend on the purity of the starting materials and the technology of layer manufacturing. Moreover, the requirements to the composition and distribution of the impurity steadily get stringent. Therefore, the requirements regarding the methods of the impurity control and carrier distribution also become tougher both in the stage of laboratory development of the structure and in various stages of manufacturing of semiconductor devices. Electrochemical capacitance-voltage profiling is distinguished among the methods of electrical diagnostics of semiconductors by the absence of special preparation of the structures and deposition of the contacts to perform measurements, thus providing for gaining information not only about the impurity distribution but also about the distribution of free carriers. The goal of this work is to perform precise measurements of the profiles of free carrier distribution in semiconductor structures of different types, and demonstrate the measuring capabilities of a modern technique for concentration distribution diagnostics, i.e., electrochemical capacitance-voltage profiling. The method allows verification of the layer thickness in semiconductor heterostructures and provide a useful and informative feedback to technologists. To increase the resolution of the method and broad up the range of available test frequencies, a standard electrochemical profiler has been modified. Mapping data for GaAs substrate structure, the profiles of the concentration distribution of the majority charge carriers in SiC structures, GaAs structure with a p – n junction, pHEMT heterostructure, GaN heterostructure with multiple quantum wells, and in a silicon-based solar cell heterostructure are presented. The obtained results can be used to analyze the physical properties and phenomena in semiconductor devices with quantum-sized layers, as well as to improve and refine the parameters of existing electronic devices.

Behavioral Change towards EE by Utilizing ICT Tools

Due to end-users’ habit being one of the prominent factors influencing building performance, changing user behavior to encourage energy efficient habits has tremendous potential to facilitate energy savings. Four ongoing European projects, eTeacher, FEEdBACk, InBetween, and UtilitEE, developed ICT solutions achieve this change through triggering mechanisms, informative feedback, gamification, and automation services within a human-centric and context aware framework. This paper provides each project’s methodology to enhance end-user engagement of their respective approach, methodology to assess the expected results, technical and legal challenges, and the preliminary results of their ICT solutions, which have also been presented at Sustainable Places 2020 conference.

Mathematics courseware for dyscalculia students (MCDYs)

MCDys is a courseware created as a learning tool for students with dyscalculia. The syllabus is developed based on the Linus module that is provided by the Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia (KPM). Dyscalculia is a term used for learners that have a disability in learning mathematics. In developing this courseware, ADDIE model is used. ADDIE is a framework that many instructional designers and developers use to develop the courses. There are five stages in ADDIE Model which are analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. To design the interface, Schneiderman's eight golden rules of interface design is used. Schneiderman's eight golden rules include striving for consistency, enabling frequent users to use shortcuts, offering informative feedback, designing dialogue to yield closure, offering simple error handling, permitting easy reversal of actions, supporting internal locus of control and reducing short-term memory load. The content of the courseware uses interactive approaches such as video, animation, and quizzes, and game-based activities to encourage users’ understanding and grab their attention. User evaluation and expert evaluation were conducted to test the effectiveness and acceptance of the interface, usability, activity, navigation, multimedia, sound, image, text, animation, and video. The results show that the courseware has the highest score for usability score with a mean of 4.6(SD=0.55). For future enhancement, more animation will be explored to suit the dyscalculia students’ learning. Keywords: courseware, Dyscalculia, ADDIE Model, Mathematics, Schneiderman’s

Pengujian Heuristic Pada Antarmuka Marketplace Desa Wisata (Studi Kasus: Guidehub.Id)

Ada 229 desa wisata yang saat ini sudah terbentuk di Yogyakarta. Desa wisata tersebut memiliki permasalahan yang beragam, salah satunya adalah pendapatan warga lokal yang tidak meningkat dikarenakan keterbatasan warga dalam mempromosikan desa wisatanya. Platform guidehub.id adalah startup yang membantu desa wisata mempromosikan paket wisata yang dimiliki. Pengguna guidehub.id adalah warga desa wisata. Keragaman latar belakang dari pengguna menuntut pembuatan antarmuka yang mudah digunakan. Kesalahan perancangan antarmuka akan berakibat pada pendapatan desa, Oleh karena itu, sebelum website digunakan oleh pengelola desa wisata, perlu adanya evaluasi terhadap website guidehub.id. Penelitian ini bermaksud mengevaluasi dengan cara mencari nilai severity rate untuk selanjutnya memberikan rekomendasi kepada pengembang website dengan metode usability heuristic. Metode yang digunakan untuk mengukur usability website adalah 8 Golden Rule dari Shneiderman. Hasilnya perbaikan antarmuka marketplace desa wisata (guidehub.id) cukup mayor. Terdapat 5 variabel yang memiliki severity rate tinggi yang artinya harus diperbaiki sebelum website diluncurkan yaitu pada variabel Strive for consistency, Offer informative feedback, Prevent Errors, Permit easy reversal of action dan Support internal locus of control. Rekomendasi untuk temuan yang ada adalah bahasa yang harus konsisten, perlu adanya pemberitahuan apakah user berhasil atau gagal login, sebaiknya ada penanganan error pada saat booking dan submit tour, sebaiknya data tetap ada ketika mengisi form dan ingin kembali ke halaman sebelumnya, dan seharusnya user memiliki control sepenuhnya ketika memilih menghapus tour namun mengurungkan niat untuk menghapus.

Interactive Dual Generative Adversarial Networks for Image Captioning

Image captioning is usually built on either generation-based or retrieval-based approaches. Both ways have certain strengths but suffer from their own limitations. In this paper, we propose an Interactive Dual Generative Adversarial Network (IDGAN) for image captioning, which mutually combines the retrieval-based and generation-based methods to learn a better image captioning ensemble. IDGAN consists of two generators and two discriminators, where the generation- and retrieval-based generators mutually benefit from each other's complementary targets that are learned from two dual adversarial discriminators. Specifically, the generation- and retrieval-based generators provide improved synthetic and retrieved candidate captions with informative feedback signals from the two respective discriminators that are trained to distinguish the generated captions from the true captions and assign top rankings to true captions respectively, thus featuring the merits of both retrieval-based and generation-based approaches. Extensive experiments on MSCOCO dataset demonstrate that the proposed IDGAN model significantly outperforms the compared methods for image captioning.