Museums and Digital Culture: From Reality to Digitality in the Age of COVID-19

Museums increasingly recognize the need to address advances in digital culture which impact the expectations and needs of their audiences. Museum collections of real objects need to be presented both on their own premises and digitally online, especially as digital and social media becomes more and more influential in people’s everyday lives. From interdisciplinary perspectives across digital culture, art, and technology, we investigate these challenges magnified by advances in digital and computational media and culture, looking particularly at recent and relevant reports on changes in the ways museums interact with the public. We focus on human digital behavior, experience, and interaction in museums in the context of art, artists, and human engagement with art, using the observational perspectives of the authors as a basis for discussion. Our research shows that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated many of the changes driving museum transformation, about which this paper presents a landscape view of its characteristics and challenges. Our evidence shows that museums will need to be more prepared than ever to adapt to unabated technological advances set in the midst of cultural and social revolution, now intrinsic to the digital landscape in which museums are inevitably connected and participating across the global digital ecosystem where they inevitably find themselves entrenched, underscoring the central importance of an inclusive integrative museum model between physical and digital reality.

Modeling of Internal Combustion Engine Ignition Systems with a Circuit Containing Fractional-Order Elements

This paper discusses the research and analysis of the dynamics of high-voltage generating systems. The test subject is an ignition system modelled by a set of two induction coils with an open ferromagnetic core that constitutes an ignition coil. The essence of the tests involved the application of magnetic coupling of the fractional order that enabled taking into account the non-idealities of the coils and the connector that implements the ignition point. The paper contains the results of a theoretical analysis, supported by digital simulations. The conducted experiments confirm the purposefulness of the conducted analyses and the possibility of modeling real objects based on circuits with fractional-order elements.

Application of active thermography in study of the rotors dynamics

The article presents the infrared measurement techniques for analyzing and monitoring the dynamic state of the structure using advanced thermal imaging techniques. The article present an overview of the infrared measurement techniques and algorithms proposed research design based on the selected infrared measurement techniques. The article presents the results of a series of studies on the possibility of applying the vibrothermography methods in SHM systems. In particular it focuses on the analysis of the possibility of studying the dynamics of the rotor and the detection of its failures during operation. The results of vibrothermography studies of impeller made of plastic are presented. The results of studies based on algorithms developed by the authors. The article also presents the concept of the use of thermal imaging research in fault detection and monitoring of the dynamic state of real objects.

The effect of cross-curricular integration on pupils’ knowledge gained through experiential learning

This study examined the effects of the cross-curricular model of integrating mathematics and science with experiential learning on the knowledge of 3rd grade primary school pupils in Slovenia. The purpose of this research was to design and implement school lessons rooted in integrating maths with science and concrete experience, and handling real objects. In the experimental group (N=149), maths and science lessons implemented a cross-curricular model which integrated experiential learning. In the control group (N=155), maths and science were taught as separate subjects without experiential learning. The data was collected with pre- and post-tests to establish pupils’ knowledge. Differences between groups were analysed through Mann-Whitney U test and Wilcoxon signed-rank test and showed that pupils from the experimental group performed better at the 2nd and 3rd TIMSS cognitive domain. Findings indicate that the cross-curricular learning model has a positive effect on pupil’s achievement in science and mathematics. Keywords: Cross-curricular integration, mathematics, science, experiential learning, TIMSS, cognitive domains

Mirror-mediated string-pulling task in Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius)

Mirror tasks can be used to investigate whether animals can instrumentally use a mirror to solve problems and can understand the correspondence between reflections and the real objects they represent. Two bird species, a corvid (New Caledonian crow) and a parrot (African grey parrot), have demonstrated the ability to use mirrors instrumentally in mirror-mediated spatial locating tasks. However, they have not been challenged with a mirror-guided reaching task, which involves a more complex understanding of the mirror’s properties. In the present study, a task approximating the mirror-guided reaching task used in primate studies was adapted for, and given to, a corvid species (Eurasian jay) using a horizontal string-pulling paradigm. Four birds learned to pull the correct string to retrieve a food reward when they could see the food directly, whereas none used the reflected information to accomplish the same objective. Based on these results, it cannot be concluded whether these birds understand the correspondence between the location of the reward and its reflected information, or if the relative lack of visual-perceptual motor feedback given by the setup interfered with their performance. This novel task is posited to be conceptually more difficult compared to mirror-mediated spatial locating tasks, and should be used in avian species that have previously been successful at using the mirror instrumentally. This would establish whether these species can still succeed at it, and thus whether the task does indeed pose additional cognitive demands.

CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS AND STUDENTS' LEARNING OUTCOMES IN LEARNING BIOLOGY OF MUSHROOM CONCEPT AT SMA NEGERI 4 BARABAI

Teachers as learning agents must be able to present the learning process contextually by involving the active participation of students. Some students learn best when they have the opportunity to interact with real objects through inquiry activities that will help students deepen their understanding of a concept. Inquiry learning is one that can be adapted to students' abilities, can build cognitive structures, and can motivate students to think critically. This research is classified as descriptive research. The subjects of the research were students of class X SMA Negeri 4 Barabai as many as 78 students in the 2015/2016 academic year on the mushroom group material. The research data were in the form of observations on students' critical thinking skills which were analyzed descriptively using categorical methods, namely very good (≥ 3), good (2-2.99), not good (1-1.99). While cognitive learning outcomes were obtained through tests and success was determined based on KKM = 67 with classical completeness 85%. The results showed that students' critical thinking skills were at least good, namely formulating hypotheses, designing experiments, conducting experiments, and making conclusions, while formulating problems, and analyzing data still needed improvement. Meanwhile, students' cognitive learning outcomes have not yet achieved minimal completeness. Keywords: critical thinking skills, learning outcomes, inquiry AbstrakGuru sebagai agen pembelajar harus mampu menyajikan proses pembelajaran secara kontekstual dengan melibatkan langsung peran serta siswa secara aktif. Sebagian siswa belajar dengan baik apabila mereka mendapat kesempatan berinteraksi dengan benda-benda nyata melalui aktivitas penyelidikan yang akan membantu siswa memperdalam pemahaman suatu konsep. Pembelajaran inkuiri merupakan salah satu pembelajaran yang dapat diadaptasikan dengan kemampuan siswa, dapat membangun struktur kognitif, dan dapat memotivasi siswa untuk berpikir kritis. Penelitian ini tergolong penelitian deskriptif. Subjek penelitian adalah siswa kelas X SMA Negeri 4 Barabai sebanyak 78 siswa tahun pelajaran 2015/2016 pada materi pokmok jamur. Data hasil penelitian berupa hasil observasi terhadap keterampilan berpikir kritis siswa yang dianalisis secara deskriptif dengan menggunakan kategorikal yakni sangat baik (≥ 3), baik (2-2,99), kurang baik (1-1,99). Sedangkan hasil belajar kognitif diperoleh melalui tes dan keberhasilan ditetapkan berdasarkan KKM = 67 dengan ketuntasan klasikal ≥ 85%. Hasil penelitian diperoleh bahwa keterampilan berpikir kritis siswa sekurang-kurangnya sudah baik, yakni merumuskan hipotesis, merancang percobaan, melakukan percobaan, dan membuat kesimpulan, sedangkan merumuskan masalah, dan menganalisis data masih perlu perbaikan. Sedangkan hasil belajar kognitif siswa belum mencapai ketuntasan minimal. Kata kunci: keterampilan berpikir kritis, hasil belajar, inkuiri

Design of customized VR serious games for the cognitive rehabilitation of retrograde amnesia after brain stroke

The paper presents a software platform to design serious games for the rehabilitation of severe memory loss by means of Virtual Reality (VR). In particular, the focus is on retrograde amnesia, a condition affecting patient's quality of life usually after brain stroke. At present, the standard rehabilitation process includes showing pictures of patient's familiar environments to help recovering the memory. The proposed rehabilitation platform aims at developing patient-specific serious games for memory loss starting from the 3D scanning acquisition of familiar environments. The Occipital Structure Sensor and the Skanect application have been used for the virtualization of the real objects and the environment. A modular procedure has been designed to interface the virtual objects of each acquired environment with the modules of the game-logic developed with Unity. In addition, the developed solution makes available a set of software modules for the patient's monitoring and the data management to automatically generate medical reports, which can be easily connected to each new patient-specific serious game. A specific test has been performed to assess the main features of the VR platform and its usability. A positive feedback has been given by the involved medical personnel, who highlighted the importance of objective data to improve the ecological validity of the cognitive rehabilitation for retrograde amnesia.

3dinfogan: 3d Models’ Reconstruction In Infogans

In computer vision and computer graphics, 3D reconstruction is the process of capturing real objects’ shapes and appearances. 3D models always can be constructed by active methods which use high-quality scanner equipment, or passive methods that learn from the dataset. However, both of these two methods only aimed to construct the 3D models, without showing what element affects the generation of 3D models. Therefore, the goal of this research is to apply deep learning to automatically generating 3D models, and finding the latent variables which affect the reconstructing process. The existing research GANs can be trained in little data with two networks called Generator and Discriminator, respectively. Generator can produce synthetic data, and Discriminator can discriminate between the generator’s output and real data. The existing research shows that InFoGAN can maximize the mutual information between latent variables and observation. In our approach, we will generate the 3D models based on InFoGAN and design two constraints, shape-constraint and parameters-constraint, respectively. Shape-constraint utilizes the data augmentation method to limit the synthetic data generated in the models’ profiles. At the same time, we also try to employ parameters-constraint to find the 3D models’ relationship corresponding to the latent variables. Furthermore, our approach will be a challenge in the architecture of generating 3D models built on InFoGAN. Finally, in the process of generation, we might discover the contribution of the latent variables influencing the 3D models to the whole network.