At the beginning of this study I wanted to discover what effects competition in games and simulations had on learning. I also wished to gain a deeper understanding of how people learn from games so that I could produce findings which would be useful to practitioners of games and simulations. My research has revealed that competition can become too great an influence on students' decisions and behaviour and then becomes harmful to learning. I found that students adopt different approaches to competitive games which I labelled Competitive or Opportunist, Learning, Skill Specific, Rhino (Really Here In Name Only) and Confused. Their approach depends upon their prior experience, age, maturity, expectations and the quality of the tutor involvement. These different approaches lead in turn to different types of decisions, behaviour and eventually, learning. I also found that tutors need to be deeply involved during the whole game in order to guide students away from over-competitive behaviour and decisions,and towards a more rational and learning orientated approach. In addition tutors need to devote considerable time and effort at the end of the game to resolving conflicts and misunderstandings. In order that my study should prove useful to practitioners I have designed models of student approaches to games and simulations as well as a model of a business game. In addition I have drawn up, on the basis of my findings, a list of suggested guidelines for tutors who use (or are thinking of using) games and simulations. I hope they will indeed prove to be beneficial to both tutors and students.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1971. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

We propose that for all situated agents, the process of task learning has many elements in common. A better understanding of these elements would be beneficial to both engineers attempting to design new agents for task learning and completion, and also to scientists seeking to better understand natural task learning. Therefore, this dissertation sets out our characterisation of agent-independent task learning, and explores its grounding in nature and utility in practise. We achieve this chiefly through the construction and demonstration of two novel task learning systems. Cross-Channel Observation and Imitation Learning (COIL; Wood and Bryson, 2007a,b) is our adaptation of Deb Roy’s Cross-Channel Early Lexical Learning System (CELL; Roy, 1999; Roy and Pentland, 2002) for agent-independent task learning by imitation. The General Task Learning Framework (GTLF) is built upon many of the principles learned through the development of COIL, and can additionally facilitate multi-modal, lifelong learning of complex skills and skill hierarchies. Both systems are validated through experiments conducted in the virtual reality-style game domain of Unreal Tournament (Digital Extremes, 1999). By applying agent-independent learning processes to virtual agents of this kind, we hope that researchers will be more inclined to consider them on a par with robots as tools for learning research.

Thesis(Ph. D.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Computer Science, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-196).

No / A mobile language learning system is implemented using an adventure game. The primary emphasis is upon graphical design and rich interaction with the user. A wide range of functionalities are described, and an efficient navigation system is proposed that uses contextual information, allowing the players to move seamlessly between mobile real and virtual worlds. The game environment is designed to have consistent graphics, dialogue, screens, and sequences of actions. Quick Response (QR) codes provide the necessary shortcuts for the players and Bluetooth connections automatically send and receive scores between teams. A response for every action is produced depending on the screen type, while keeping the file size manageable. Similar user tasks were kept spatially close together with a clearly designated beginning, middle and end. The main sources of error such as entering and extracting contextual data are predicted and simple error handling is provided. Unexpected events in mobile environments are tolerated and allowed. Internal locus of control is provided by ‘automatic pause’, ‘manual pause’ and ‘save’ commands to help players preserve their data and cognitive progress. The game environment is configurable for novice or expert players. This game is also suitable for students with auditory problems and female students are also specifically addressed.

In 1935 the linguist George Kingsley Zipf made a now classic observation about the relationship between a word's length and its frequency: the more frequent a word is, the shorter it tends to be. He claimed that this 'Law of Abbreviation' is a universal structural property of language. The Law of Abbreviation has since been documented in a wide range of human languages, and extended to animal communication systems and even computer programming languages. Zipf hypothesised that this universal design feature arises as a result of individuals optimising form-meaning mappings under competing pressures to communicate accurately but also efficiently - his famous Principle of Least Effort. In this thesis, I present a novel set of studies which provide direct experimental evidence for this explanatory hypothesis. Using a miniature artificial language learning paradigm, I show in Chapter 2 that language users optimise form-meaning mappings in line with the Law of Abbreviation only when pressures for accuracy and efficiency both operate during a communicative task. These results are robust across different methods of data collection: one version of the experiment was run in the lab, and another was run online, using a novel method I developed which allows participants to partake in dyadic interaction through a web-based interface. In Chapter 3, I address the growing body of work suggesting that a word's predictability in context may be an even stronger determiner of its length than its frequency alone. For instance, Piantadosi et al. (2011) show that shorter words have a lower average surprisal (i.e., tend to appear in more predictive contexts) than longer words, in synchronic corpora across many languages. We hypothesise that the same communicative pressures posited by the Principle of Least Effort, when acting on speakers in situations where context manipulates the information content of words, can give rise to these lexical distributions. Adapting the methodology developed in Chapter 2, I show that participants use shorter words in more predictive contexts only when subject to the competing pressures for accurate and efficient communication. In a second experiment, I show that participants are more likely to use shorter words for meanings with a lower average surprisal. These results suggest that communicative pressures acting on individuals during language use can lead to the re-mapping of a lexicon to align with 'Uniform Information Density', the principle that information content ought to be evenly spread across an utterance, such that shorter linguistic units carry less information than longer ones. Over generations, linguistic behaviour such as that observed in the experiments reported here may bring entire lexicons into alignment with the Law of Abbreviation and Uniform Information Density. For this to happen, a diachronic process which leads to permanent lexical change is necessary. However, crucial evidence for this process - decreasing word length as a result of increasing frequency over time - has never before been systematically documented in natural language. In Chapter 4, I conduct the first large-scale diachronic corpus study investigating the relationship between word length and frequency over time, using the Google Books Ngrams corpus and three different word lists covering both English and French. Focusing on words which have both long and short variants (e.g., info/information), I show that the frequency of a word lemma may influence the rate at which the shorter variant gains in popularity. This suggests that the lexicon as a whole may indeed be gradually evolving towards greater efficiency. Taken together, the behavioural and corpus-based evidence presented in this thesis supports the hypothesis that communicative pressures acting on language-users are at least partially responsible for the frequency-length and surprisal-length relationships found universally across lexicons. More generally, the approach taken in this thesis promotes a view of language as, among other things, an evolving, efficient code for information transfer.

This study aims to explore how novices learn computer games. In order to observe the characteristics of learning a novel computer game, an eye tracking method was integrated with usability studies&amp / #8217 / methods. Data was collected from 16 undergraduate university students. Every student played the game for 10 minutes. Their eye movements were recorded with an eye tracker. Subjects&amp / #8217 / behaviors were also videotaped while playing the game. Results showed that eye tracking can be used as measure to study learning experience of games. Theoretical implications and applicability of the findings to the use of computer games for educational purposes were discussed.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Multi-agent multi-team systems are commonly seen in environments where hierarchical layers of goals are at play. For example, theater-wide combat scenarios where multiple levels of command and control are required for proper execution of goals from the general to the foot soldier. Similar structures can be seen in game environments, where agents work together as teams to compete with other teams. The different agents within the same team must, while maintaining their own ‘personality’, work together and coordinate with each other to achieve a common team goal. This research develops strategy-based multi-agent multi-team systems, where strategy is framed as an instrument at the team level to coordinate the multiple agents of a team in a cohesive way. A formal specification of strategy and strategy-based multi-agent multi-team systems is provided. A framework is developed called SiMAMT (strategy- based multi-agent multi-team systems). The different components of the framework, including strategy simulation, strategy inference, strategy evaluation, and strategy selection are described. A graph-matching approximation algorithm is also developed to support effective and efficient strategy inference. Examples and experimental results are given throughout to illustrate the proposed framework, including each of its composite elements, and its overall efficacy. This research make several contributions to the field of multi-agent multi-team systems: a specification for strategy and strategy-based systems, and a framework for implementing them in real-world, interactive-time scenarios; a robust simulation space for such complex and intricate interaction; an approximation algorithm that allows for strategy inference within these systems in interactive-time; experimental results that verify the various sub-elements along with a full-scale integration experiment showing the efficacy of the proposed framework.

Research in the digital game-based learning domain has so far shown mixed results as to the use of narrative in educational games. The aim of this thesis is to help to answer the question of whether and to which extent it is reasonable to employ the narrative feature in educational games for young children. In addition to a literature review, the thesis presents an experimental study comparing two versions of a maths game that are the same except for for the richness of the game's story (a value-added study). The participating children (N = 67) from school year 2 and 3 (mean = 8.67 years, SD = 0.4 years) were given the opportunity to play a game for two weeks on touch devices: a game version with a simple narrative frame, or a game version with a rich story narrated through an interactive voiced comic, or a "placebo" game (control group). No significant effect of the rich narrative on the children's engagement, as reported by parents, was found (d = 0.45, p = .245). Furthermore, the two narrative condition groups did not differ in terms of in-game progress (Cliff's δ = 0.01), and the difference was neither significant for the number of solved game tasks (d = 0.08, p = .857), nor the learning gains (d = -0.25, p = .691) measured using a near-transfer maths skill test (pre-post design). Both narrative...