by King-fai Tam. / Bibliography: leaves 151-158 / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1983

Title: Evaluation of pupils' interest in adventure activities during school physical education lessons Objectives: The aim of the master thesis is to evaluate the interest in adventurous activities of pupils aged 11 to 15 at the Elementary school Bronzová in Prague, based on a set up adventurous program. Methods: The research sample consisted of 145 pupils, aged 11 to 15, 78 girls and 67 boys. Data were gathered by a questionnaire, which included closed, semi-closed and open questions addressed to pupils. Further data were collected by teachers' observation. Gathered data were recorded in writing, graphically processed and evaluated. Results: Results showed that pupils were actively involved in the adventurous programme and were interested in adventurous activities within the physical education lessons. They have experienced the greatest adventure on the obstacles and during trust activities. Pupils do not seek adventurous activities during their free time. Keywords: adventure, experience, adventure education, initiative games, adventure programme

Adventure tourism is currently regarded as one of the fastest growing forms of nature-based tourism within the alternative tourism industry. Historically, adventure was only considered a by-product on journeys of discovery and exploration as travellers sought new land, wealth and knowledge. As the uncertainty surrounding travel diminished and more people began to travel further in search of new and exciting pursuits, the term adventure tourism began to take shape. Those who travelled further to remote and exotic nature-based settings to participate in unique and adventurous activities become known as adventure tourists. These travellers may be thought of as being the first adventure tourists, although modern-day adventure tourism has its origins in numerous historic themes in travel and ways of thinking, including those of explorers and adventurers, pilgrims, travel writer adventurers, merchants and traders, trekking, Outward Bound and World War periods. Although being a much debated topic amongst scholars, adventure tourism is described as travel to a remote, exotic or nature-based destination with the purpose of participating in adventure activities. Adventure activities are usually associated with risk, challenge and danger and are pursued for their ability to provide the participant with unknown outcomes, constricting emotions, educational opportunities, and novel, thrilling, stimulating, exciting and adrenaline rush experiences. Adventure activities also differ in respect of their requirements to competently overcome different levels of challenge. Challenges posed by adventure activities can range from the routine to the extreme and are therefore divided into two categories, namely soft and hard adventure activities. Soft adventure activities require little to no previous experience or skills as they only contain perceived levels of risk, whereas hard adventure activities are regarded as highly challenging activities that require great mental and physical effort to perform. The bulk of the adventure tourism market consists of soft adventure tourists. This is also true of the visitors who participate in adventure activities in national parks, as most adventure offerings in the parks consist of soft adventure activities, such as safaris, game drives, camping, and trail walking, to name but a few. A great number of these adventure activities are centred on family groups and more mature audiences, as they make up the majority of the market of visitors visiting South African National Parks. In other words, from the over 80% of funding that is self-generated by South African National Parks, these markets are considered primary contributors to park income. Unfortunately, it was estimated that by 2022 operational cost would have exceeded tourism profits due to the constant increase in conservation costs and land management costs. A feasible solution to this problem was identified; connecting a broader South African society with national parks to help support and protect the natural heritage of the parks. This included the development of new adventure activities for current and potentially new markets that will respond to both the adventure and wilderness lore of national parks. Therefore, the primary objective of this study was to determine tourist needs for adventure activities in South African National Parks. A literature analysis of adventure tourism and adventure tourism product development, which provided the background for the empirical study, was conducted. A quantitative research approach was followed by means of an electronic questionnaire that was posted on the SANParks web site under the sub-link 'Media & News', allowing for convenience sampling. Respondents had access to the questionnaire during the months of April and May 2014, from which 387 usable questionnaires were obtained. Data was analysed using descriptive and exploratory statistics for arriving at the empirical results. The socio-demographic profile of the majority of respondents who completed the questionnaire was found to be as follows: almost an equal number of females (51%) and males (49%) spoke English as a home language, married, obtained some kind of diploma or degree, averaged an age of 49 years, and resided in Gauteng or the Western Cape. Thirty-four percent (34%) of respondents included children in their travel party of which the majority were between the ages of nineteen to twenty-five years. It was also identified that respondents visited national parks an average of 8.54 times over a five-year period and stayed an average of two to seven nights, while most respondents were owners of a Wild Card. Most respondents indicated that they participated in adventure activities but felt that current adventure activities in national parks were sufficient. Respondents were also willing to pay for adventure activities in national parks, ranging from R101-R300 for an activity per person. Respondents were offered the opportunity to identify the level of importance between a list of soft and hard adventure activities for national parks, as well as motives for participating in adventure activities. Three factor analyses were conducted on these lists from which eight factors were identified for the soft adventure activities (water-based, interpretive, wildlife interaction, heritage, consumptive, trail/trekking, self-executing and team-based), three factors for the hard adventure activities (adrenaline rush, wilderness training and survival courses, and adventure sports) and two factors for adventure participation motives (internal and external motives). The most important soft adventure factor with the highest mean value was interpretive (safari/game viewing, night drives, bird watching, stargazing, guided walks and hot air ballooning), with self-executing (guided and unguided 4x4 trails and campsite camping) in second place, heritage (archaeological tours, historical tours, geographical tours and botanical tours) in third place and trail/trekking (backpacking, cycling routes, hiking and horseback safaris) in fourth place. Self-executing was also considered the only factor that had a positive small effect correlation with visits over the past five years, meaning that if visitor visits increase so does the importance of self-executing activities. Wilderness training and survival courses (field-guide training, wilderness camping, survival and wilderness training, and survival games) were considered as the most important hard adventure factor. Regarding adventure participation motives, respondents considered external motives, such as getting in touch with nature, spending time with family and friends, educational reasons, escaping routine and exploring a new destination, to be the most important reasons for participating in adventure activities. The profile of visitors who were most likely to participate in adventure activities was below the age of forty years and not a Wild Card member. It was also identified that males generally had a higher preference rate for adventure activities, including respondents that were either single or living together. In conclusion, this study found that there is a need for a variety of adventure activities in national parks and visitors are motivated by the social and environmental aspects of adventure activities, rather than by the performance thereof. The results in this study can assist South African National Parks in the development of appropriate adventure activities as a strategy to combat future increases in operational costs. / MA (Tourism Management), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

Adventure tourism is currently regarded as one of the fastest growing forms of nature-based tourism within the alternative tourism industry. Historically, adventure was only considered a by-product on journeys of discovery and exploration as travellers sought new land, wealth and knowledge. As the uncertainty surrounding travel diminished and more people began to travel further in search of new and exciting pursuits, the term adventure tourism began to take shape. Those who travelled further to remote and exotic nature-based settings to participate in unique and adventurous activities become known as adventure tourists. These travellers may be thought of as being the first adventure tourists, although modern-day adventure tourism has its origins in numerous historic themes in travel and ways of thinking, including those of explorers and adventurers, pilgrims, travel writer adventurers, merchants and traders, trekking, Outward Bound and World War periods. Although being a much debated topic amongst scholars, adventure tourism is described as travel to a remote, exotic or nature-based destination with the purpose of participating in adventure activities. Adventure activities are usually associated with risk, challenge and danger and are pursued for their ability to provide the participant with unknown outcomes, constricting emotions, educational opportunities, and novel, thrilling, stimulating, exciting and adrenaline rush experiences. Adventure activities also differ in respect of their requirements to competently overcome different levels of challenge. Challenges posed by adventure activities can range from the routine to the extreme and are therefore divided into two categories, namely soft and hard adventure activities. Soft adventure activities require little to no previous experience or skills as they only contain perceived levels of risk, whereas hard adventure activities are regarded as highly challenging activities that require great mental and physical effort to perform. The bulk of the adventure tourism market consists of soft adventure tourists. This is also true of the visitors who participate in adventure activities in national parks, as most adventure offerings in the parks consist of soft adventure activities, such as safaris, game drives, camping, and trail walking, to name but a few. A great number of these adventure activities are centred on family groups and more mature audiences, as they make up the majority of the market of visitors visiting South African National Parks. In other words, from the over 80% of funding that is self-generated by South African National Parks, these markets are considered primary contributors to park income. Unfortunately, it was estimated that by 2022 operational cost would have exceeded tourism profits due to the constant increase in conservation costs and land management costs. A feasible solution to this problem was identified; connecting a broader South African society with national parks to help support and protect the natural heritage of the parks. This included the development of new adventure activities for current and potentially new markets that will respond to both the adventure and wilderness lore of national parks. Therefore, the primary objective of this study was to determine tourist needs for adventure activities in South African National Parks. A literature analysis of adventure tourism and adventure tourism product development, which provided the background for the empirical study, was conducted. A quantitative research approach was followed by means of an electronic questionnaire that was posted on the SANParks web site under the sub-link 'Media & News', allowing for convenience sampling. Respondents had access to the questionnaire during the months of April and May 2014, from which 387 usable questionnaires were obtained. Data was analysed using descriptive and exploratory statistics for arriving at the empirical results. The socio-demographic profile of the majority of respondents who completed the questionnaire was found to be as follows: almost an equal number of females (51%) and males (49%) spoke English as a home language, married, obtained some kind of diploma or degree, averaged an age of 49 years, and resided in Gauteng or the Western Cape. Thirty-four percent (34%) of respondents included children in their travel party of which the majority were between the ages of nineteen to twenty-five years. It was also identified that respondents visited national parks an average of 8.54 times over a five-year period and stayed an average of two to seven nights, while most respondents were owners of a Wild Card. Most respondents indicated that they participated in adventure activities but felt that current adventure activities in national parks were sufficient. Respondents were also willing to pay for adventure activities in national parks, ranging from R101-R300 for an activity per person. Respondents were offered the opportunity to identify the level of importance between a list of soft and hard adventure activities for national parks, as well as motives for participating in adventure activities. Three factor analyses were conducted on these lists from which eight factors were identified for the soft adventure activities (water-based, interpretive, wildlife interaction, heritage, consumptive, trail/trekking, self-executing and team-based), three factors for the hard adventure activities (adrenaline rush, wilderness training and survival courses, and adventure sports) and two factors for adventure participation motives (internal and external motives). The most important soft adventure factor with the highest mean value was interpretive (safari/game viewing, night drives, bird watching, stargazing, guided walks and hot air ballooning), with self-executing (guided and unguided 4x4 trails and campsite camping) in second place, heritage (archaeological tours, historical tours, geographical tours and botanical tours) in third place and trail/trekking (backpacking, cycling routes, hiking and horseback safaris) in fourth place. Self-executing was also considered the only factor that had a positive small effect correlation with visits over the past five years, meaning that if visitor visits increase so does the importance of self-executing activities. Wilderness training and survival courses (field-guide training, wilderness camping, survival and wilderness training, and survival games) were considered as the most important hard adventure factor. Regarding adventure participation motives, respondents considered external motives, such as getting in touch with nature, spending time with family and friends, educational reasons, escaping routine and exploring a new destination, to be the most important reasons for participating in adventure activities. The profile of visitors who were most likely to participate in adventure activities was below the age of forty years and not a Wild Card member. It was also identified that males generally had a higher preference rate for adventure activities, including respondents that were either single or living together. In conclusion, this study found that there is a need for a variety of adventure activities in national parks and visitors are motivated by the social and environmental aspects of adventure activities, rather than by the performance thereof. The results in this study can assist South African National Parks in the development of appropriate adventure activities as a strategy to combat future increases in operational costs. / MA (Tourism Management), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

This dissertation aims at positioning adventure games in game studies, by describing their formal aspects and how they have integrated game design with stories. The adventure game genre includes text adventures (also known as interactive fiction), graphical text adventures, and graphic adventures, also referred to as point-and-click adventure games. Adventure games have been the first videogames to evidence the difficulty of reconciling games and stories, an already controversial topic in game studies. An adventure game is a simulation, the intersection between the rule system of the game and its fictional world. The simulation becomes a performance space for the player. The simulation establishes how the player can interact with the world of the game. The simulated world integrates a series of concatenated puzzles, which structure the performance of the player. Solving the puzzles thus means advancing in the story of the game. The integration of the story with the simulation is done through the performance of the player. The game design establishes a specific set of actions necessary to complete both the game and the story, and this set of actions constitutes a behavior that must be restored through performance. The player can also explore the world and its workings, which is necessary to solve the puzzles. By solving the puzzles, the player restores this pre-set behavior. The simulation in adventure games may not be evident because of a historical shift in the level of abstraction, which determines how the world is implemented in the game mechanics. Adventure games have increasingly curbed the agency of the player in the world, in order to facilitate completing the story of the game. This move to a less fine-grained interaction has affected different aspects of game design, from reducing the number of possible actions to limiting the interactivity of non-player characters. The dissertation discusses how adventure games have integrated story with the performance in the simulated world of the game. This integration is further evidenced by how they apply to the four basic elements that bridge story and game design: space, player character, non-player character and time. The qualities of these elements help us understand how the player performs in the simulation, and how that performance is designed. Analyzing the properties of the simulation in adventure games helps draw comparisons with other videogame genres. The rich history of adventure games can inform the game design of other videogames, particularly in relation to the creation of fictional worlds, strategies to script the interactor, and design of non-player characters.

The South African government has recognized tourism as a key development priority and an important contributor to the South African economy. Numerous global lifestyle and travel trends impact the nature of tourism, changing it from consisting of mass standardized travel options to more customized niche offerings. Globally adventure tourism has been recognized as one of the fastest growing niche travel market segments. Whilst South Africa has enormous potential for adventure tourism, it is fast becoming a highly competitive sector with many countries competing for a share. For the South African adventure travel product to grow and prosper, it needs the support of South African Tourism (SAT) to successfully market and promote it to the appropriate target market.

This thesis is about learning at a residential outdoor education centre [pseudonym:- Wild Country Hall]. It poses and answers three questions: • How useful might discursive positioning be as a perspective on learning? • What are the discourses at Wild Country Hall and how are they different to schooling discourses? • How might neo-Liberal discursive practices, including performativity and current schooling orthodoxies have affected the pedagogic practices at this centre? The review of literature provides an overview of the key literature on outdoor, adventure and experiential learning, considering these through the lenses of learning as acquisition, participation and transformation, before discussing the literature on the discursive positioning of identity. Literature on the discursive practices of outdoor centres is then considered in relation to literature on neo-Liberalism and performativity in schools. The methodology is ethnographic. Participant observations were conducted over a period of five years whilst children were participating in both the organised adventure activities and the residential life of the centre. Searches of the centre’s documentary archives, and follow up interviews with 22 children (aged eight to 11) and three adults were used to add richness to the observational data, and especially to better understand reported participant gains. Analysis was undertaken by coding themes in the data using QSR NVivo N6. The findings suggest that acquisitional and participatory perspectives on learning are not totally adequate for explaining the reported changes in outlook and behaviour of the children who took part in the research. These benefits may be more usefully conceptualised as discursively re-positioned identity. It is suggested that the perspective on learning as discursive positioning may be usefully employed by those studying residential outdoor education in the future. The findings show a number of over-arching discourses that dominate the life of Wild Country Hall. These include place - including the appreciation, care of and respect for nature, the sense of awe and wonder, understanding and protecting the environment – risk, challenge and adventure; and consequent confidence and resilience building by children through facing and over-coming their fears. Whilst some of these fears are linked to the adventure activities of the centre (such as fears of heights, water), other fears are associated with the residential nature of the centre; encountering and coping with homesickness, living with new people, encountering strange customs and unfamiliar social practices. So important were these unfamiliar discourses to the participating children that they may be looked upon as ‘rites of passage’. The findings suggest that encountering unfamiliar discourses may explain the efficacy of learning at Wild Country Hall. Some of the pedagogic practices at Wild Country Hall were found to valorise what may be described as ‘classroom discourses’, and these have tended to formalise learning at the centre. It is suggested, therefore, that this outdoor centre has been influenced by performativity and classroom orthodoxy, themselves shaped by neo-Liberal agenda. These influences may be narrowing the range of discourses available and limiting the centre’s continuing ability to provide unfamiliar discourses, possibly to the detriment of children’s learning. The conclusion makes a number of recommendations for policy practice and research. Recommendations for policy and practice focus on the narrowing tendencies observed at this centre, suggesting shifts in policy to retain the distinctiveness of outdoor education centres. Recommendations for research suggest that follow-up studies would be useful to test the findings in other outdoor centres and other areas of learning, whilst more methodological work could be done on memory and data research sites where contemporaneous notation and digital recording may be difficult or impossible.

The South African government has recognized tourism as a key development priority and an important contributor to the South African economy. Numerous global lifestyle and travel trends impact the nature of tourism, changing it from consisting of mass standardized travel options to more customized niche offerings. Globally adventure tourism has been recognized as one of the fastest growing niche travel market segments. Whilst South Africa has enormous potential for adventure tourism, it is fast becoming a highly competitive sector with many countries competing for a share. For the South African adventure travel product to grow and prosper, it needs the support of South African Tourism (SAT) to successfully market and promote it to the appropriate target market.

Before Eternity is a short 3D adventure game that addresses the purpose of our earthly lives, inspired by the Sufi poet Rumi. To support its mystical theme, the design employs impressionistic elements and symbolic activities which deliberately defy many conventions of traditional adventure games. This report explains the design and implementation of the game, as well as its technical and production aspects.

Title: Risk perception and attitudes towards risk of young scouts from European countries. Objectives: The aim of the study was to find out differences of risk perception and attitudes towards risk between young scouts from European countries. Methods: The questionnaire was filled by 126 young scouts from 18 European countries. Asked scouts were in Rover and Rangers categories, aged 16 to 25. The research sample consisted of 66 men and 60 women. Questionnaires Risk orientation questionnaire were analysed by basic statistic methods like median and mean. Specific comparison was made by Pearson coefficient and factor analysis. The aim of their using was to compare parts of the questionnaire (sex, countries, similarity of answers). For some comparison were chosen only countries with more respondents (≥ 9). Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark were joined up to one category Scandinavia. Results: There are no significant results shown by mean and median for countries with respondents (≥ 9). Small variances were qualified only for the Czech Republic, Germany and Portugal. Comparing results of men a women shown small differences only in questions 5 and 6. In general, there were no significant differences between men a women. Factor analysis, particularly, correlation factors shown small...