Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The widespread use of on-line computer games makes this medium a valuable vehicle for information sharing, while scalability facilitates global collaboration between players in the game space. Game engines generally provide an intuitive interface allowing attention to be shifted to the understanding of scientific elements rather than hiding them between a wealth of menus and other counterintuitive user interfaces. These strengths are applied towards promoting the understanding of planetary systems and climate change. Unconventional interaction and visualization techniques are introduced as a method to experience geophysical environments. Players are provided with dynamic visualization assets, which enable them to discover, interrogate and correlate scientific data in the game space. The spirit of exploration is to give players the impetus to conceptualize how complex Earth and planetary systems work, understand their intrinsic beauty and the impact of humans, while providing a sense of responsibility for those systems.

In this post-genome era, structural and functional biology is playing an increasingly important role in Life Science research and development. Transforming current bio education for future research biologists is therefore a challenging task. Learning structural biology starting from K-12 year or in pre-university education is an issue of strategic importance. This paper presents our experimental work on bio edutainment for structural biology learning in secondary schools. Through playing, students will have a more intuitive way to understand better bio-molecular structures. Immersive and interactive games may potentially motivate students to explore the wonders of Life Science. The bio edutainment solution developed is powered by the Virtual Reality technology.

In this paper, we present strategies and approaches used to implement a synthetic learning environment which includes distributed interactive simulation, computational steering, interactive visualization, and artificial intelligence for learning abstract scientific concepts and entertainment. We use Navier-Stokes equations as a case study to show our ideas and methods. Students are allowed to interact with one another and engage in realistic collaborative exercises. The resulting technology is a testbed that reflects the benefits of a schoolhouse for training and education, especially for scientific abstract concepts, yet does not have the physical limitation that instructors, students and resources be collocated both spatially and temporally. Our innovative use of computational steering and interactive visualization allows students to visualize and manipulate the physical process, and understand the abstract concept through entertainment.

This paper explores educational uses of virtual learning environment (VLE) concerned with issues of learning, training and entertainment. We analyze the state-of-art research of VLE based on virtual reality and augmented reality. Some examples for the purpose of education and simulation are described. These applications show that VLE can be means of enhancing, motivating and stimulating learners’ understanding of certain events, especially those for which the traditional notion of instructional learning have proven inappropriate or difficult. Furthermore, the users can learn in a quick and happy mode by playing in the virtual environments.

In this paper, we propose a novel method of perceptual evaluation of pronunciation quality for Computer Assisted Language Learning used in e-learning. The overall score of the pronunciation quality is the combination of the matching score, the perceptual score and the asymmetric score. The matching score is the measure of the acoustic distortion of the test speech, the perceptual score models the perceived distortion by human in perception domain and the asymmetric score describes the asymmetric effect of the sensation of the deletion error and the insertion error in spoken English. The correlation coefficient between the predicted objective score and the subjective score by the experts is 0.75, which is advantageous over current methods based on HMM.

Social navigation in a community of practice (CoP) is an approach of locating information through increased social awareness. Designing support for social navigation requires precise knowledge about the users’ needs and wishes so as to meet user participatory design methodology. User requirement definition on social navigation is, however, difficult to elicit. On the one hand, without the context of the CoP, it is hard to collect the user requirements on navigation, especially when the concept of virtual community is new to the target user group. On the other hand, to set up such a virtual community, preliminary studies on social navigation is however necessary. This paper presents the experiences how we dealt with such a chicken and egg problem. Different approaches were used: performing a theoretical study, administering an online questionnaire, observing on an existing virtual society, analyzing similar systems, prototyping, and conducting an expert walk-through.

Because cooperative learning and Internet technologies are increasingly universal, how to help learners to learn effectively using the on-line learning systems and adopting teaching processes is increasingly important. Based on conceptual graph theory, this study proposed a strategy for efficiently storing learner knowledge structure and producing learning materials. By following the teaching process involved in giving lessons, the strategy uses the stored knowledge structure to produce adaptive group learning material for group learning activities. Additionally, this study used a curriculum to implement an experiment, and then used the experimental results to prove the ability of the proposed strategy to help learners to learn more efficiently.

Distant e-learning emerges as one of promising means for people to learn online. Although there is a substantial increase in computer and network performance in recent years, mainly as a result of faster hardware and more sophisticated software, there are still problems in the fields of integrating various resources towards enabling distant e-learning. This paper provides an on demand e-learning platform based on Service Grid technologies. In this platform, the virtual learning services for students, instructors and course providers are provided leveraging on Service Grid resource management capabilities on group collaboration, ubiquitous data access, and computing power.

In this paper we report on an interdisciplinary course ”Computing and Art” taught at the Sabanci University, Istanbul for the first time in fall of 2004. We also present research activities initiated by the course activities and continued to graduate work. The two faculty members teaching the course as well as the students are an equal mix from the visual communication design and computer science departments. The course’s objective is to create interactive 3D virtual environments by multiple teams of students comprised of one computer science and one design student each. The students are challenged to develop real-time graphics software and well designed virtual spaces and/or interfaces as part of the course project. However the primary mission for both domain members is to create meaningful content that is to be implemented into a non-linear spatial structure, possessing non-linear narrative; thus necessitating content development, scenario and dialogue writing, as well as research, such as relevant social, historic, art historic, audial or scientific data, when and as needed. In this paper we present the structure of the course, as well as some of the projects and lessons learned.

In this paper, Petri net theory is taken into analyzing the Virtual Experiment (VE) in the Virtual Experiment Environment (V.E.E.). After applied the Petri net to V.E.E., the V.E.E. then can monitor the experiment progress and measure the learning effects of students when the students are doing experiment. Petri net is an approach that can be used as a visual-communication aid similar to flow charts, block diagrams, and networks. Therefore, the experiment steps are easily modeled by Petri net. According to the data which is collected by the V.E.E., there are two major error types that a student might make during an experiment. The first error type is the procedural error and the other one is measuring error. In the end of this paper, an experiment system is implemented. There were 72 3 year students in junior high school involved in the experiment. In this experiment, we did both of pre-test and post-test in order to make sure the Petri net-enhanced V.E.E. is useful.