Coding, robotics and socio-emotional learning: developing a palette of virtues

This paper describes a pedagogical approach, Coding as Another language (CAL) to teach programming and computational thinking in early childhood. The CAL curriculum connects powerful ideas from the discipline of computer science with ideas from literacy in a way that is developmentally appropriate for children 4-8 years of age. CAL is free and can be used with two widely available programming environments for young children: the free on-screen ScratchJr app and the KIBO robotics kit that doesnt require keyboards or screens. Through 24 lessons centered on books, CAL emphasizes creative play and self-expression by positioning the learning of programming as the mastering of a new symbolic language. In addition, CAL provides opportunities for socio-emotional development in the context of a collaborative play-based learning environment, a coding playground, in which there is purposeful exploration of ethical and moral values and intentional promotion of positive behaviors and chrachter strenghs.

Location-Based Games and the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Analysis of Responses from Game Developers and Players

In early 2020, as a countermeasure to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments issued limitations on the movements of their citizens, cancelling social events and advising people to stay home. As location-based games (LBGs) have been found to influence human movement, their role during COVID-19 deserves closer inspection. Under regular circumstances, the very aim of these games is to motivate people to go out, explore and meet other people. However, during COVID-19, people were advised to do the exact opposite. To study how LBG developers and players reacted to the situation, we used the netnography research method utilizing three types of data: (1) COVID-19 related in-game changes made by seven popular LBG developers during March 2020; (2) social media reactions on 20 posts across three popular Pokémon GO subreddits; and (3) the raiding activity (collaborative play) in Pokémon GO in a Finnish municipality during February–May 2020. All observed LBGs made in-game changes due to COVID-19. The social media reactions showed overwhelming appreciation towards these changes, and two central second order themes arose: (1) LBGs have the ability to influence human movement during pandemics; and (2) people should be able to self-regulate their behaviour during COVID-19 independent of LBG influence. Surprisingly, recorded Pokémon GO player activity in Finland was more influenced by offered in-game rewards than the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings have implications on how games and gamification can be used to direct human movement in situations such as COVID-19 where population-level interventions are needed.

Collaboration and Marriage: The Dynamiter

This chapter considers Stevenson’s acknowledged collaborations with his wife, Fanny, most substantially, their co-written work, The Dynamiter, also titled More New Arabian Nights (1885). Husband and wife collaborations create subtle problems, largely because we expect a wife to assist her husband without credit. The Dynamiter structurally draws upon The Thousand and One Nights, which themselves concern issues of narrative and marriage. The Dynamiter, a novel about Irish terrorism, was well regarded in the nineteenth century, but not so in the twentieth or twenty-first, precisely because recent critics have resented Fanny’s involvement. The chapter additionally considers Fanny and Louis’ collaborative play “The Hanging Judge” and the controversy surrounding Fanny’s short story “The Nixie.”

The Elizabethan Legacy of Sir Thomas More: Sir John Harington, Anthony Munday, and the tentative rise of the ecumenical English renaissance

Tudor historians of Henry VIII's reign strove both to define the great political theological controversies of the day and to shape the future understanding of past events. This essay considers how Roman Catholic accounts of the life and martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, including those by Nicholas Harpsfield and Thomas Stapleton, shaped subsequent Protestant works of fiction, written during the 1590s. The essay explores, in particular, the collaborative play, Sir Thomas More, by Anthony Munday and revised by Shakespeare and others; and Sir John Harington's references to More and Bishop John Fisher in the preface to his translation of Orlando Furioso and his extensive anecdotal remarks about More's scatological witticisms in his satirical tract, The Metamorphosis of Ajax. Such fictional works presage both the hesitant trend towards ecumenism and the imagined reunion of Christendom of the subsequent Jacobean reign, and the later emergence of the transnational secular public sphere, which transpired during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.