Using Gamification and Serious Games to Design a New Curriculum

Using game elements in class to support the participation of students in learning or designing games that can help educators teach certain subjects more efficiently has been a popular topic in recent years. The former is a matter of gamification, which refers to the application of game elements to other activities so that the activity becomes more engaging or interesting. On the other hand, the latter is about designing a serious game, which can be defined as a game with an explicit and carefully thought out educational purpose. In this study, focused on merging the use of gamification and serious games for a specific engineering course, the authors discuss how the curriculum for this course should be designed so that both sides of the spectrum are facilitated. An application of this union is given with a survey showing the reaction of students to the gamified curricula integrated with a serious game.

The Proper and Foreing: The Problem of French Children’s Literature Translation into Ukrainian

The translation of children’s literature has certain specificities because it must be subject to several constraints: taking into account the double recipient in children’s literature (child and adult), the educational purpose, the diastratic variation, etc. Wonderful Neighbors (2016) by Hélène Lasserre is a children’s book about difference, tolerance and living together. The gap between French and Ukrainian cultures leads to problems with the perception of socio-cultural realia by readers of the target language who sometimes misunderstand or even reject them. In this intervention, we analyze the perception of the album by the readership of the source and target culture based on the comments of the readers which will allow understanding the editorial strategies and the choices of translation procedures made by the translators. In particular, we study the text-image relationships and the influence of extralinguistic factors on the lexical level. In a second step, it is necessary to analyze the role of the educational purpose which may provide for certain censorship of children’s text to which the translator must obey in order to meet the demands of a publisher and his/her readership.

Refocusing Zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on Education

This paper examines the concept of the ‘division of learning’, and the broader thesis of ‘surveillance capitalism’ within which it is situated, in terms of its relevance to education. It begins with defining the term, before suggesting two key ways in which aligning the ‘division of learning’ with perspectives from educational research might provide productive insights for both domains. The first considers the impact of increasing ‘datafication’ in education, where platform technologies are proliferating as powerful actors that both mediate and shape educational activity. Here the ‘division of learning’ offers useful insights concerning the disparities resulting from learning in and learning from educational platforms. The second explores the extent to which education theory might offer ways to develop the concept of the ‘division of learning’, through critique of the term ‘learning’ itself, as well as the foregrounding of questions of educational ‘purpose’. Here the ‘division of learning’ is suggested to maintain, rather than challenge, the dominant practices of data exploitation, for which further engagement with a purposive, political, and emancipatory form of ‘data science’ is suggested.

Dominance of General versus Specific Aspects of Wellbeing on the Student Subjective Wellbeing Questionnaire

The Student Subjective Wellbeing Questionnaire (SSWQ) is a 16-item measure of school-specific subjective wellbeing. Previous studies have found evidence supporting the interpretation of scores as consisting of four domain-specific factors (i.e., joy of learning, academic efficacy, educational purpose, school connectedness) along with a domain-general factor (i.e., general student wellbeing). We extended previous work to scrutinize the SSWQ factor structure and score reliability by analyzing responses from a large sample (N = 1,020) of adolescents in grades 9-12. Using confirmatory factor analyses, we reevaluated the previously supported SSWQ structures and tested the tenability of alternate bifactor models. Additionally, we tested if scores derived from simple summing of SSWQ item ratings were practically equivalent to model-derived factor scores. Results provided partial support for the replication of data-model fit for SSWQ correlated-factors and higher-order models. Model convergence problems were noted when fitting all 16 items to a bifactor structure with the educational purpose items identified as the key source of misfit and dropped. The revised 12-item bifactor model showed strong fit and was retained as the new preferred SSWQ structure. Reliability indices for the general student wellbeing score were consistently strong yet reliability of subscale scores was significantly weaker. Correlation between the domain-general sum scores of the 12- and 16-item versions was very strong (r = .98), suggesting significant overlapping variance. The correlation between the 12-item sum score and model-based general factor score was also very strong (r = .97) but did not meet our threshold for practical equivalence. We recommend future researchers reevaluate the SSWQ item content and factor structure and use model-based factor scores for analyses when operating in a latent factor framework. Ultimately, we emphasize interpreting the SSWQ general score over the subscale scores to parse individual differences or make decisions regarding intervention allocation.

Uveitis [Only for Educational Purpose]

Uveitis is a general term describing a group of inflammatory diseases that produces swelling anddestroys eye tissues. These diseases can slightly reduce vision or lead to severe vision loss.The uvea is the middle layer of the eye. It lies beneath the white part of the eye (the sclera). It ismade of the iris, ciliary body, and choroid. These structures control many eye functions,including adjusting to different levels of light or distances of objects. The term “uveitis” is used because the diseases often affect a part of the eye called the uvea.Nevertheless, uveitis is not limited to the uvea. These diseases also affect the lens, retina, opticnerve, and vitreous, producing reduced vision or blindness.It is characterized as seen in young adults with both eyes affected to it, mostly recurrent and cancause blindness.Uveitis may be caused by problems or diseases occurring in the eye or it can be part of aninflammatory disease affecting other parts of the body.It can happen at all ages and primarily affects people between 20-60 years old.Uveitis can last for a short (acute) or a long (chronic) time. The severest forms of uveitis reoccurmany times.

The destruction of the idyll: Linda Castillo’s and Jodi Picoult’s Amish crime fiction

The present article discusses recent developments in American crime fiction, namely the so-called Amish mysteries by Linda Castillo and Jodi Picoult. The aim is to show that although Castillo’s and Picoult’s fiction has been termed ethnic crime writing, the way these writers make use of the Amish setting does not serve the primarily educational purpose of raising awareness of a specific ethnic group as was the case with the older generation of ethnic crime writers (such as Tony Hillerman and P.L. Gaus). Employing Bakhtin’s idyllic chronotope (a concept most often critically applied to classic works1 but shown here as a versatile instrument for discussing genre literature as well) as a point of reference, the paper further analyses how the narratives invoke this familiar spatial model and initiate its violation. It is argued that the writers’ narrative strategies serve to achieve the sharpest contrast between the idyllic place of love, family and labour and the hideous crimes committed there, implying that idyllic rurality is either too fragile to be attainable or that its existence is a mere deception.