Gamification and Augmented Reality to Upgrade Elementary Bilingual Education Students' Health and Engagement

Sedentary life-style, obesity, and early school leaving have been identified as major causes leading to the biggest health and educational problems in developed countries. This may derive into students showing a not recommended passive role at these ages, which also leads to their lack of interest and motivation in learning and education. This chapter presents an innovation research project which aims to face sedentariness in elementary school by applying an instructional technology-based model with the use of gamification and augmented reality in a bilingual education context. The case study shows several educational advantages, including increase in physical exercise, health awareness, learning engagement, and upgrade in L2 content understanding and linguistic skills.

Gamification and Augmented Reality to Upgrade Elementary Bilingual Education Students' Health and Engagement

Sedentary life-style, obesity, and early school leaving have been identified as major causes leading to the biggest health and educational problems in developed countries. This may derive into students showing a not recommended passive role at these ages, which also leads to their lack of interest and motivation in learning and education. This chapter presents an innovation research project which aims to face sedentariness in elementary school by applying an instructional technology-based model with the use of gamification and augmented reality in a bilingual education context. The case study shows several educational advantages, including increase in physical exercise, health awareness, learning engagement, and upgrade in L2 content understanding and linguistic skills.

Nature Experiences in Science Education in School: Review Featuring Learning Gains, Investments, and Costs in View of Embodied Cognition

This review examines the didactic use of nature experiences in science education, in primary and secondary school (7–16 years) globally. From the perspective of embodied cognition the review explores the types of nature experiences used in science teaching. Focus is on returns when we invest in nature-based science learning, such as specific academic achievements in the form of long-term effects on learning and memory and how we maximize those returns. The review also addresses challenges and barriers, such as costs and labour involved when using nature experiences in science teaching. Initially, 3,659 articles were selected, with the initial screening leading to the inclusion of 159 studies. Of these articles, 34 studies forming the corpus in this review investigated the effect of using nature experiences as an intervention. These studies are divided into four themes: content understanding, environmental education, teaching scientific methods, and costs and challenges to teaching science outdoors. Informed by the perspective of embodied cognition, the review addresses the returns in terms of learning and academic achievements, the mode of action of the intervention, the investment, costs in the form of labour, challenges, and gaps in the theoretical underpinning of the field. Based on the review, using nature experiences in science education seems promising regarding increasing content knowledge, insight into science methodologies and pro-environmental behaviours. Interventions exploiting the schoolyard, school gardens, or nearby park areas are particularly promising due to the simultaneous strengthening of local engagement at low costs. However, using nature experiences as an alternative to traditional in-class teaching depends on profound didactic deliberations and preparations, which are difficult for the individual teacher to address single-handedly. The review also reveals an urgent need for research that thoroughly explores the connections between teaching practices and theoretical foundations to consolidate the field. To that end, it is noteworthy that a few studies also reported on prior pilot studies demonstrating the need for testing the entire design before conducting the actual research. Teachers seldom experience the opportunity to preview their teaching strategies before performing in front of their students.

Student Insights Related to the Use of Simultaneous Speech Translation for Video Lectures in a University English Course

For native English-speaking teachers, the ability to overcome communication issues caused by not having the same first language as their pupils is a challenge, especially with low-level students. The increased use of video lectures due to COVD-19 has made this even more difficult. This study was conducted to investigate whether the use of Artificial Intelligence-powered interlingual Simultaneous Speech Translation subtitled video lectures could be a practical solution to overcome this challenge. To that end, 14 participants from a first-semester prerequisite General English course took part in this study. A semi-structured interview was combined with surveys and descriptive statistics, and data was analyzed through qualitative means of thematic, descriptive, and inductive procedures that relied on simultaneous analysis and category construction. Key findings were as follows: First, respondents found the subtitled videos to be highly satisfactory and fairly accurate. Second, respondents reported greater content understanding as the main advance and less emphasis on improving listening ability as the primary disadvantage. Third, the use of English instead of Korean subtitles or subtitling only certain sections of the video in Korean were the main suggestions for the future. Specific responses from the student interviews and future implications are discussed.

ASSESSMENT OF CULINARY CLASS DEMONSTRATION METHODS ON STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCE: VIDEO VERSUS LIVE STREAMING

The temporarily close of educational institutions due to the Covid-19 lockout situation affected educators at every level of education to conduct classes online. This study explored whether the use of video demonstration significantly improves students' performance of learning culinary compared with control group counterparts who were exposed to the live streaming demonstration. In addition, students' perceptions of the instructions are assessed. A quasi-experimental study design was used for this study. The study sample consisted of 36 undergraduate Hospitality students enrolled in a culinary course. Sixteen students in the experimental group and 20 students in the control group were exposed to video and live streaming demonstrations, respectively. Both groups were tested about the same target content, ‘Understanding Vegetables and Basic Cuttings’. Students’ performance grades were computed and analyzed to compare students’ learning outcomes between the two groups. Students’ perceptions were assessed based on their opinions of instruction, their self-reported level of understanding of vegetables and basic cuttings, and their level of satisfaction. Results of independent samples t-tests showed; students in the experimental group had a significantly higher performance score and express positive perceptions of the instruction than the students in the control group. The findings from this study would shed light on the instructional strategy suitable for culinary students.

Class term as a part of the proper name or as an appellative identification of the onymic object and the consequences of its understanding on capitalization

According to the principles of standardization of anoikonyms (minor place-names) and following the rules of Slovak orthography, the appellative expressing the type of a certain object is written with a small initial letter if it is not part of the name and stands before the name. This rule generally applies to all proper names. However, in some cases this appellative is understood as part of the name and it therefore tends to be written also with a capital initial letter. The paper deals with explanation of differences between the appellative member, the appellative component of a proper name, which is part of a proper name, and the information about a proper name in the form of an appellative, which is part of the onymic content of a proper name, but which is not part of a proper name. The author explains this problem on the basis of V. Blanár’s theory, which is based on the content understanding (designation) of proper names and on the interrelatedness of linguistic and onomastic status of the proper name and on the using of proper names in communication. In Czech onomastics, R. Šrámek holds similar theoretical bases.

Platform Effects on Alternative Influencer Content: Understanding How Audiences and Channels Shape Misinformation Online

People are increasingly exposed to science and political information from social media. One consequence is that these sites play host to “alternative influencers,” who spread misinformation. However, content posted by alternative influencers on different social media platforms is unlikely to be homogenous. Our study uses computational methods to investigate how dimensions we refer to as audience and channel of social media platforms influence emotion and topics in content posted by “alternative influencers” on different platforms. Using COVID-19 as an example, we find that alternative influencers’ content contained more anger and fear words on Facebook and Twitter compared to YouTube. We also found that these actors discussed substantively different topics in their COVID-19 content on YouTube compared to Twitter and Facebook. With these findings, we discuss how the audience and channel of different social media platforms affect alternative influencers’ ability to spread misinformation online.

Joint Subtitle Extraction and Frame Inpainting for Videos with Burned-In Subtitles

Subtitles are crucial for video content understanding. However, a large amount of videos have only burned-in, hardcoded subtitles that prevent video re-editing, translation, etc. In this paper, we construct a deep-learning-based system for the inverse conversion of a burned-in subtitle video to a subtitle file and an inpainted video, by coupling three deep neural networks (CTPN, CRNN, and EdgeConnect). We evaluated the performance of the proposed method and found that the deep learning method achieved high-precision separation of the subtitles and video frames and significantly improved the video inpainting results compared to the existing methods. This research fills a gap in the application of deep learning to burned-in subtitle video reconstruction and is expected to be widely applied in the reconstruction and re-editing of videos with subtitles, advertisements, logos, and other occlusions.

Speaker Identification and Its Application to Social Network Construction for Chinese Novels

Character is one of the three elements of a novel, and conversation is an important way to describe characters. The personality, emotion, and interpersonal relationships of characters are reflected in conversations. Thus, extracting conversations, speakers and other conversation elements from novels are crucial for character analysis and content understanding. We start with Jin Yong’s novels, annotate the largest Chinese corpus for speaker identification with 9721 quotes, and analyze language styles of different characters based on quotes. We then propose a machine learning-based speaker identification method, and design feature templates that show a good performance. For the application of speaker identification, we construct the social network of characters in Jin Yong’s novels based on dialog chain, which lays the foundation for the analysis of the relationship between characters in novels.