Mobile Game

As the COVID-19 storms the globe, there are many efforts to battle it. This paper looks at the development of one such an effort in a form of a mobile game. The game is a 2D arcade game called Unus Terra. It is intended to be entertaining but aims to influence people to partake in social distancing through several mechanics. An early version of the game is evaluated by five usability and user experience experts using heuristics and a few other selected methods. In this paper, we present the results from these evaluations along with our findings from using this type of evaluation method. The use of heuristics is considered from the perspectives of academics and practitioners.

This paper presents work done within the EU project STARR. Within the framework of the project technologies to empower and support stroke survivors are developed. We report on the iterative development of an outdoor activity game for stroke survivors, and discuss design choices, experiences from the initial testing and outline potential future developments.

Serious games are defined as games with a purpose. These games serve a purpose beyond play in difference to games, whose purpose is nothing than the play activity itself. Human Computation Games, a particular form of a serious game, engage humans to solve problems, the computer cannot solve, at least today. Humans solve the problems voluntarily and with fun, because the tasks and their solution are part of a game. The Human Computation Paradigm proposed by Luis von Ahn has been implemented until today in a variety of Online Games. A wellknown example is the ESP Game. Within this paper we present a Serious Mobile Game, based on the Human Computation Paradigm. Our game is a vampire roleplaying game designed to support the production of landmarks for mobile navigation of pedestrians. The shift from online to mobile games, based on the players' physical movement in a mixed game world, has consequences for the design of a Human Computation Game.

Therapies based on serious games is gaining a lot of interest by the healthcare community. The efficiency of this approach is demonstrated by several studies and many projects. This paper presents the project Super-Fon, which is focused on a serious game developed as a mobile application to support speech therapeutic intervention in the phonological development area. The game design follows the metaphon therapy approach, implementing its phases and levels, and it intends to motivate children between three and eight years old to execute activities to improve phonological competencies while having a fun experience. A first prototype was developed for Android-based tablets.

Diplomová práce se zaměřuje na mezinárodní marketing v oblasti herního průmyslu. Zaměřuje se na pojetí, trendy a možnosti tvorby marketingové strategie na trhu s mikrotransakcemi. V teoretické části práce budou vymezeny základní pojmy a vytvořena teoretická východiska v oblasti marketingu mikrotransakcí, chování zákazníků a možnosti jejich zaujetí. V praktické a návrhové části bude vytvořen návrh marketingové strategie pro vyvíjenou hru autorem této práce na základě kvalitativního výzkumu a teoretické části, která má za účel zvýšit počet aktivně platících zákazníků za prémiové služby ve hrách.The thesis is focused on international marketing of gaming industry. It’s focus is on trends and possibilities of international marketing strategy for microtransactions. The theoretical part aims to define basic concept of gaming industry, marketing, microtransactions, customer behavior and ways to engage with him. The analytical part is creating a concept of international marketing strategy fo...

This paper presents a mobile game to be played by fifth and sixth grade students during their free time, to improve the knowledge they obtain at school. The game uses a unique story and various interaction mechanisms (e.g., drawing on the screen, tilting the phone) to take the focus away from the educational aspects, so that the players feel like they are playing, not studying. User tests have been performed, showing that most students improved their knowledge and providing feedback for future developments.

As the COVID-19 storms the globe, there are many efforts to battle it. This paper looks at the development of one such an effort in a form of a mobile game. The game is a 2D arcade game called Unus Terra. It is intended to be entertaining but aims to influence people to partake in social distancing through several mechanics. An early version of the game is evaluated by five usability and user experience experts using heuristics and a few other selected methods. In this paper, we present the results from these evaluations along with our findings from using this type of evaluation method. The use of heuristics is considered from the perspectives of academics and practitioners.

A life without language as a system of communication is a life that cannot be lived to the fullest. Aphasia, a multimodal neurophysiologic disorder manifested by a substantial communication restriction due to brain damage, is one of the many possible causes that can make life language-less. Fortunately, it can be treated by speech therapy to rehabilitate language skills and can even be improved by therapy via an app to supplement communication experiences as proven by recent studies. As a contribution to the gaming rehabilitation industry, this paper aims: i) to design and develop a speech therapy game application, as an additional neurorehabilitation modality for aphasia patients, and ii) to assess its applicability as an adjunct to the traditional neuromuscular rehabilitation through a pilot study. Eight sessions of game-based speech therapy were applied to seven aphasic patients, 10-15 minutes per day, once a week, for 8 successive weeks. Aphasia assessment in stroke patients was performed with a multidimensional assessment tool, built-in to the therapeutic game, based from Quick Aphasia Battery (QAB) before and after treatment. The comparison of before and after treatment revealed an improvement in all of the QAB subtests: level of consciousness, connected speech, word comprehension, sentence comprehension, picture naming, repetition, reading aloud, and motor speech. This suggests that the development of this speech therapy game and the preliminary findings from the pilot study may indeed be an effective neurorehabilitation instrument for therapy of aphasia patients.

The teaching and learning of language has, for many years, been centered on the four language competencies- listening, speaking, reading and writing. However, in modern times, the need to train students with critical, analytical, evaluative, creative, and problem-solving skills in order to meet and deal with the complex nature of modern-day challenges and real-life issues has made the teaching and learning of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) indispensable. This study, therefore, investigates the attitude of language tutors towards the teaching of HOTS. This study has a descriptive qualitative approach. 39 English language tutors from the Colleges of Education who voluntarily availed themselves as participants were recruited for the study. Using semi-structured interviews and classroom observation as data collection instruments, the data were subjected to a thematic analysis. It is revealed that teachers perceive HOTS to be a good concept and hence use strategies such as asking op...

This article examines how the unique characteristics of Marvinter, an inclusive transmedia Advent calendar, affected its production and the individual media workers involved in this. In the native transmedia Marvinter project, a radio series and a mobile game were created and released simultaneously. Using ‘partly shared’ resources, the project was developed by two collaborating, non-profit organisations. Each chapter of the digital game had to match the corresponding radio episode. The whole had to be designed to provide a shared cultural experience that included people with hearing or visual impairments. The authors of the present article were part of the game development team and thus directly experienced the complexity of developing a digital game as part of a transmedia project. This article presents the results of a case study with an insider perspective. It is supplemented by semi-structured interviews with key people in the project. The transmedia nature of Marvinter was jus...

the research team published the mobile science learning game SpacEscape to Google Play Store, introduced the game to more than 1,000 middle school students even during the pandemic, collected more data to understand how learner conduct problem-solving using mobile games, and presented the research at the Games for Change 2020 Virtual Conference to more than 500 attendees. In this report, we will share the activities, findings, and future research of the project. Overview of Activities After receiving the grant, the faculty members assembled the team, and started the game design and development. The overview of activities of this project includes game design and development, research collaboration, conference attendance and presentation. 1. Game Design and Development The 2020 SpacEscape team was consists of 10 members (3 HU faculty members, 1 IMED student, 2 CICS students, 4 high school students). The team worked together for six months on the design, development, and research, see team member roasters in Figure 1.

Smart phones and mobile devices are among the most important inventions of modern technology. Their physical and potential capabilities offer a wide variety of opportunities to software programmers for developing new applications. Of these applications, educational games can efficiently promote the learning goals. The speech therapy applications are educational games which can be more effective if they use interactive games running on mobile devices. Materials and Methods: In this research, a mobile speech therapy application is designed to help children with Down Syndrome (DS) to improve their speaking skills. The application helps the children memorize the words and checks their pronunciation with an offline speech processing algorithm. The speech therapy application was tested on 5 children with different severity of DS. The application was assessed from two aspects of ease of use and efficiency by a Likert-type 5 item questionnaire under supervision of an expert. Also paired samples t test was performed to compare the efficiency of mobile application with the traditional speech therapy methods. Results: According to the paired samples t test results, the decision measure was 0.020 (less than 0.05), which shows that mobile application of speech therapy prefers to the traditional method. Conclusion: The results show that the application is effective and easy enough for children with Down Syndrome to use. Also the comparing assessment with the traditional teaching method show that using mobile application as a means of education will improve learning efficiency.

At EA/CITAR (School of Arts/Research Centre in Science and Technology of the Arts), sound has always assumed a fundamental role, both in academic research and curricular offer, featuring a Master Program in Sound Design and a Doctoral Program Specialization in Computer Music. This paper presents an overview of some recent artistic/research projects undertaken by students and researchers at this institution, which stimulate the user/listener awareness for the acoustic phenomenon. Furthermore, we describe three pedagogical practices, stemming from Soundscape and Film Sound studies, which aim at training students to avoid the devious influence of sight on the assessment of soundscapes.

BACKGROUND Aphasia is the loss or impairment of language functions and affects every day social life. The disorder leads to the inability to understand and be understood in both written and verbal communication and affects the linguistic modalities of auditory comprehension, verbal expression, reading, and writing. Due to heterogeneity of the impairment, the training must be adapted individually and dynamically to the patient needs. An important factor for a successful aphasia therapy is dose frequency. Computer-based applications allow patients to train independently with high intensity at home. But most of the newest tele-rehabilitation applications focus on one linguistic modality, whereas there is currently a lack of validated tele-rehabilitation systems that focus on multimodal linguistic modalities. OBJECTIVE The aim of this project was to develop a multimodal system that enables aphasic patients to train at home using language-related tasks autonomously and also allows therap...

Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) are crucial in the 21st century learning process since it requires a high ability to think critically and teachers to have appropriate skills to face technological and global challenges. Therefore, it is essential to study about HOTS and the relation with teachers’ perceptions. The research aimed to investigate teachers' perceptions towards HOTS and to know how they are reflected in teaching and learning process. This research used mixed method design. In obtaining the data about teachers' perceptions towards HOTS, the researcher used a questionnaire and in-depth interview. The questionnaire was distributed to 10 teachers from different schools and background knowledge in Java. The results showed that the teachers who were aware of the importance of HOTS tend to foster their students in mastering HOTS and to have high skills in problem solving and critical thinking, while the teachers who were lack of awareness will focus on giving their s...

Pervasive games are an emerging new game genre, which includes context information as an integral part of the game. These games differ from traditional games in that they expand spatio-temporal and social aspects of gaming. Mobile devices support this by enabling players to choose when and where a game is played. Designing pervasive games can be a challenging task, since it is not only limited to the virtual game world, but designers must consider information flow from the real world into the game world and vice versa. In this paper, we describe a user study with an experimental pervasive multiplayer mobile game. The objective was to understand how the players perceive pervasiveness in the game and what the crucial factors are in the design. Based on the results, we propose initial design guidelines and compare them to other design guidelines for the pervasive games.

Therapies based on serious games is gaining a lot of interest by the healthcare community. The efficiency of this approach is demonstrated by several studies and many projects. This paper presents the project Super-Fon, which is focused on a serious game developed as a mobile application to support speech therapeutic intervention in the phonological development area. The game design follows the metaphon therapy approach, implementing its phases and levels, and it intends to motivate children between three and eight years old to execute activities to improve phonological competencies while having a fun experience. A first prototype was developed for Android-based tablets.

Abstract. Within the past few years, companies have begun publishing financial reports in an XML-based open-standard file format called XBRL. Providing easy public access to XBRL formatted data of company disclosures would provide investors, analysts, and accounting ...

The aim of this article is to investigate the perceptions of university students on the use of edutainment in promoting Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) in English as a second language (ESL) writing. 20 diploma students from Malaysia University of Science & Technology (MUST) participated in this study. This study adopts quantitative research design where a set of questionnaires was distributed to the students. Before answering the questionnaire, the students went through a treatment using edutainment. They had to play an online game downloaded from Play Store. They spent 13 weeks playing the game. At the end of the treatment, they had to sit for the post test. Then they were asked to complete the questionnaire. This study is in bringing positive impact to the society starting from the ministry to the students regarding the importance of the edutainment implementation in classroom teaching. The findings reveal that the students perceived that Edutainment has affected the stimulation of higher order thinking skills in their writing. This suggests that edutainment should be incorporated in the teaching and learning English.

Many countries, including Malaysia have been undergoing a transformation of education in line with the 21st century world of rapid development in technology, innovation and economic competitiveness. Knowledge of Science and Mathematics, which can be mastered in-depth and the acquisition of higher order thinking skills are needed to fulfill this transformation. However, the decline of students’ achievement in the Science and Mathematics subjects in international assessments such as, TIMSS and PISA has become a worrying indicator. Therefore, this study was conducted to determine the level of high achieving students’ achievement in answering higher order thinking skills (HOTS) questions, particularly in Electrolysis through laboratory learning activities. A total of 82 students from two residential schools in Johor were involved in the study. Structured and short essay questions covering the four highest cognitive levels of the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy by Anderson and Krathwohl (level of applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating) were used as the instrument. The data was analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS). The results showed that the majority of students (98%) had low scores (below 50%) when answering HOTS questions. This shows that the students were weak in answering HOTS questions. This was likely due to the lack of students' conceptual understanding of the problems involved. Therefore, alternative methods such as assessment using concept maps should be intensified in order to help students gain deeper conceptual understanding which in turn can be a stimulus to increase HOTS.

A life without language as a system of communication is a life that cannot be lived to the fullest. Aphasia, a multimodal neurophysiologic disorder manifested by a substantial communication restriction due to brain damage, is one of the many possible causes that can make life language-less. Fortunately, it can be treated by speech therapy to rehabilitate language skills and can even be improved by therapy via an app to supplement communication experiences as proven by recent studies. As a contribution to the gaming rehabilitation industry, this paper aims: i) to design and develop a speech therapy game application, as an additional neurorehabilitation modality for aphasia patients, and ii) to assess its applicability as an adjunct to the traditional neuromuscular rehabilitation through a pilot study. Eight sessions of game-based speech therapy were applied to seven aphasic patients, 10-15 minutes per day, once a week, for 8 successive weeks. Aphasia assessment in stroke patients was performed with a multidimensional assessment tool, built-in to the therapeutic game, based from Quick Aphasia Battery (QAB) before and after treatment. The comparison of before and after treatment revealed an improvement in all of the QAB subtests: level of consciousness, connected speech, word comprehension, sentence comprehension, picture naming, repetition, reading aloud, and motor speech. This suggests that the development of this speech therapy game and the preliminary findings from the pilot study may indeed be an effective neurorehabilitation instrument for therapy of aphasia patients.

Human activity recognition is an important ability in any system that supports human in performing their daily activities. However, current supervised approach in human activity recognition is difficult to be deployed in the natural human living environment where labeled observations are scarce. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of K-means clustering and simple template models to achieve human activity detection and recognition in an unsupervised manner. The features used are extracted from the skeleton data obtained from an inexpensive RGBD (RGB-Depth) sensor. Our results show an average detection performance of 80.4% precision and 83.8% recall. The availability of an unsupervised approach in human activity recognition will make possible the wide adoption of human activity recognition in the natural human living environment.

At EA/CITAR (School of Arts / Research Centre in Science and Technology of the Arts), sound has always assumed a fundamental role, both in academic research and curricular offer, featuring a Master Program in Sound Design and a Doctoral Program Specialization in Computer Music. This paper presents an overview of some recent artistic/research projects undertaken by students and researchers at this institution, which stimulate the user/listener awareness for the acoustic phenomenon. Furthermore, we describe three pedagogical practices, stemming from Soundscape and Film Sound studies, which aim at training students to avoid the devious influence of sight on the assessment of soundscapes.

In this paper we introduce an effective approach for game design based on auditory, non-speech, feedback. We describe the design and implementation of a mobile application -Murky Shootingthat makes use of sound to engage the user in a shooting game experience. Further, we discuss the pros and cons of the mobile version compared with the former desktop version and conclude with a presentation of the preliminary results, which prove that auditory cues solely are sufficient to provide an effective way of interaction, allowing the user to improve his/her performance and keep immersion in the game narrative.

Poor literacy remains a barrier to economic empowerment in the developing world. We make the case that "serious games" can make an impact for these learners and highlight that much remains to be learned about designing engaging gameplay experiences for children living in rural areas. Our approach revolves around game design patterns, which are building blocks that can inform game designs. We argue that patterns are beneficial because they facilitate the reuse of existing knowledge about successful games, and can capture contextual information such as domain applicability that has evolve through iterative testing. We describe the design of three mobile games based on patterns and report on a field experiment with rural children in India that evaluated these games against games that were not designed with patterns. We found that patterns are decontextualized design tools that can both help and hinder good designs. We distill lessons on the contextual factors that designers must consider when using patterns to design for this user group. These factors include designing for fun by focusing on the gameplay process and not only the winning conditions, and taking the power structure in local communities into consideration in the game designs.

Abstract A predictive analysis of user navigation in the Internet is presented that exploits time-of-the-week data. Specifically, we investigate time as an environmental factor in making predictions about user navigation. An analysis is carried out of a large sample of user, navigation data (over 3.7 million sessions from 0.5 million users) in a mobile-Internet context to determine whether user surfing patterns vary depending on the time of the week on which they occur.