This diploma thesis deals with development potential of board games. The first part of the thesis defines basic concept of competence and its impact on ability to solve problems. Next it examines use of games as a means of increasing said competence. These theoretical findings are then used in the practical part of the thesis. The practical part compares individual board games and their ability to increase the competence to solve problems.

Submitted by Silvana Teresinha Dornelles Studzinski (sstudzinski) on 2015-05-14T13:19:54Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Janaína Menezes.pdf: 3325969 bytes, checksum: c9d6a7eacfa7c41df20c524f7e4dcb93 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-14T13:19:54Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Janaína Menezes.pdf: 3325969 bytes, checksum: c9d6a7eacfa7c41df20c524f7e4dcb93 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013 / Nenhuma / Essa pesquisa está vinculada à Linha “Educação, Desenvolvimento e Tecnologias do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação da Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos – UNISINOS. O tema está relacionado ao uso de jogos sociais digitais para a aprendizagem de Língua Inglesa. Os autores que embasaram a investigação são: Castells (2000), Gee (2008), Lemos (2002, 2009, 2012), Moita (2007), Piaget (1990), Primo (2007, 2008), Recuero (2004, 2005, 2010), Schlemmer (2002, 2009), Veen; Vrakking (2009), Warschauer (2012). O problema de pesquisa desta dissertação consiste em investigar como um jogo social, presente no contexto de uma mídia social digital pode se constituir enquanto ambiente para aprendizagem da Língua Inglesa. O objetivo dessa pesquisa consistiu em investigar e compreender como ocorre o interesse, bem como a aceitação do uso de um jogo usado como entretenimento para fins de aprendizagem, analisar as possibilidades de sintonia entre o jogo e o conteúdo programático da aula presencial física de Língua Inglesa, analisar como os participantes colaboram entre si durante o jogo e como essa colaboração contribui para a aprendizagem e analisar e compreender como as interações dos participantes com o jogo podem favorecer o desenvolvimento da competência comunicativa na aprendizagem da segunda língua. Para esta pesquisa foram utilizados dois jogos sociais digitais The Sims Social e Wetopia, presentes no Facebook, com dois grupos de alunos de Língua Inglesa. A pesquisa teve enfoque qualitativo, de natureza exploratória e utilizou a metodologia de estudo de caso. Os dados foram coletados por meio das interações entre os participantes durante o jogo registradas em chats e no mural dos grupos criado no Facebook e também em entrevistas semi-estruturadas após o experimento. Como resultados da pesquisa, salienta-se que os jogos sociais digitais presentes no contexto de uma mídia social digital possibilitam um ambiente para o ensino e aprendizagem de Língua Inglesa, favorecendo o desenvolvimento de competência comunicativa, permitindo a sintonia entre a sala de aula presencial física e o contexto do jogo, engajando os participantes em atividades colaborativas e gerando interesse pela sua aprendizagem com e através dos jogos. Portanto, esta dissertação traz para a reflexão o potencial sócio-cognitivo presente no ambiente dos jogos sociais digitais e como tais tecnologias podem permitir novas e diferentes formas de construção de conhecimento na Língua Inglesa. / This research is linked to the Research Line "Education, Technology and Development” present in the Program of Graduate Education at Vale do Rio dos Sinos University- UNISINOS. The theme is related to the use of digital social games for learning English. The authors based the research are: Castells (2000) , GHG (2008), Lemos (2002, 2009, 2012), MOITA (2007), Piaget (1990), PRIMO (2007, 2008), RECUERO (2004, 2005, 2010), Schlemmer (2002, 2009), VEEN; Vrakking (2009), Warschauer (2012). The research problem of this dissertation is to investigate how a social game, present in the context of digital social media can be constituted as an environment for learning the English language. The objective of this research was to investigate and understand how the interest occurs, as well as the acceptance of the use of a game used as entertainment for learning, analyze the possibilities of harmony between the game and the syllabus of the English curriculum, analyze how participants collaborate with each other during the game and how this collaboration contributes to learning and to analyze and understand how the interactions of the participants with the game may favor the development of communicative competence in second language learning. For this research we used two digital social games The Sims Social and Wetopia present in Facebook, with two groups of students of English. The research approach was qualitative, exploratory in nature and used the case study methodology. Data were collected through the interactions between the participants during the game chats and recorded content present in the wall of the groups created on Facebook as well as on semi-structured interviews after the experiment. As the survey results, it is noted that the digital social games present in the context of a digital social media enable an environment for teaching and learning English Language, favoring its the development, allowing the alingment between classroom and the games, engaging participants in collaborative activities and generating interest intheir learning with and through games. Therefore, this dissertation brings to reflection the socio-cognitive potential in the environment of digital and social games and how such technologies can enable new and different ways of constructing knowledge in English.

Abstrakt Under vårt kandidatarbete arbetade vi under 20 veckor med att utveckla ett webbaserat spel riktat mot Facebook. Vi använde Agile/Scrum som projektmetod för vårt arbete och förändrade metoden och utvecklade verkyg för att effektivisera den för vårt syfte. Vi kom fram till att det är svårt att göra ett socialt spel och att det viktigaste i produktionen är att se till att det finns en tydlig koppling mellan spelarnas interaktion med varandra och den grundläggande spelmekaniken. Vi tappade fokus under utvecklingen och lärde oss den hårda vägen vikten av att planera realistiskt och börja ifrån grunden när man utvecklar ett spel. Spelet vi skapade använder sig av slumpässigt genererad terräng, är skrivet i JavaScript och utspelar sig i en viktoriansk miljö. Nyckelord: Facebook, spelutveckling, webbutveckling, internet, sociala spel Abstract During our bachelor thesis we worked for 20 weeks with the development of a web-based game for Facebook. We used Agile/Scrum as our project planning method, changed the method to make it more effective for our purpose and developed tools for the method. We came to the conclusion that it's hard to make a social game and that the most important thing in the production is to make sure that there's a clear connection between the players' interaction with each other and the foundations of the game mechanics. We lost focus during the development and learned the hard way the value of planning realistically and to start from the core when developing a game. The game we created uses a random generated terrain, is written in JavaScript and takes place in a Victorian environment. Keywords: Facebook, game development, web development, internet, social games

Social games have become a digital phenomenon over the last few years, affecting a lot of peoples everyday life. This paper focuses on how social games can affect workplace relationships. Through qualitative interviews I investigate how people who play with their colleagues experience the social games and their influence on the social interaction in the workplace. 10 interviews were carried out with people from four different organizations. The findings from these interviews were then put in relation to previous research and existing theories concerning workplace relationships and social games. The findings suggests that social games help to maintain and enhance existing relationships between colleagues. The research also show that although only a few of the interviewed believe that their relationships has been affected noticeably, the games become a common interest between the colleagues, resulting in increased conversation and more non-workrelated topics.

<p>  </p> <p>Heating and cooling (HC) energy use account for about 40% of the total annual energy consumption and cost of an average household in the U.S and it is significantly affected by residents’ energy-related behavior. This is particularly important for low-income residents in the U.S. who spend a larger portion of their income (i.e., about 16%) on home energy costs compared to average-income households (i.e., 4%). To address opportunities for reducing residential HC energy usage without requiring physical building upgrades, this thesis presents a new paradigm for smart and connected energy-aware communities that leverage smart eco-feedback devices and social games to engage residents in understanding and reducing their home energy use.</p> <p><br></p> <p>First, this Thesis presents a new modeling approach for personalized eco-feedback design integrated with a collaborative social game to assist residents to enhance their thermostat use while promoting community-level energy savings. The modeling framework is integrated into a cloud-based application, MySmartE, with visual (wall-mounted tablet) and voice (Alexa) user interfaces to facilitate behavioral changes in a user-centric approach. The platform is deployed in a multi-unit residential community in Fort Wayne, IN and the experimental data are used to investigate: (i) how occupants’ thermostat behaviors changed after using the MySmartE app; (ii) how users interacted with the app during the game; and (iii) how was users’ experience with the developed platform. Despite the heterogeneous characteristics of households, the results from the field study show the positive effect of the intervention in the thermostat-adjustment behaviors, which results in an increase in the indoor temperature during the cooling season compared to the baseline period. Findings from the user interaction analysis and post-experiment interviews also reveal the significant potential to nudge households’ energy conservation behaviors with the developed platform along with the challenges that should be tackled to derive long-term behavior changes. </p> <p><br></p> <p>Second, this Thesis introduces a sociotechnical modeling approach based on utility theory to reveal causal effects in human decision-making and infer attributes affecting households’ thermostat responses during an eco-feedback intervention. This modeling approach (i) is based on a utility model that quantifies residents’ preferences over indoor temperatures given decision attributes related to their thermal environment and eco-feedback and (ii) incorporates latent parameters that are inferred to determine the unique behavioral characteristics of each household. For parameter learning, a hierarchical Bayesian model is developed with a non-centered parameterization and calibrated to the field data. Based on the calibration results, the proposed model quantifies the impact of the eco-feedback on households’ thermostat-adjustment behaviors and serves as a foundation for analyzing resident behavior in connected residential communities with eco-feedback energy-saving programs.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Finally, this Thesis presents a modeling approach for investigating the decision trends of residents in goal-oriented collaborative social games while considering their decision preferences and goal achievement capabilities. The proposed approach involves a mechanism design method that derives optimal decisions by conducting counterfactual simulations given various scenarios of goal and reward sets. This modeling approach (i) re-defines utility functions to include decision attributes that reflect user preferences on the game status; (ii) calibrates the model to learn the decision preferences of the residents; (iii) simulates the decision-making process of residents by solving the Nash Equilibrium for a given set of game scenarios. The results revealed the decision trends of the residents given the various goals and rewards along with the potential goal achievement trends and the resulting variations in the marginal community utility.</p>

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Crowdsourcing has been used in the cultural heritage domain for a variety of tasks. One of them is generation of descriptive metadata for digital archives. Gamification offers citizens a more entertaining way to interact with digital collections and generate useful metadata as a side effect of gameplay. The rise of social gaming on Facebook in recent years opens new horizons for cultural heritage institutions to leverage the capabilities of social networking platforms and to gain immediate access to millions of potential contributors. In this work, we explore the integration of social networks with crowdsourcing games for generating archival metadata. We studied crowdsourcing, gamification and social dynamics from the perspective of cultural heritage and combine their features in a metadata game prototype on the Facebook platform. We tested our prototype and evaluate its results by analysing participation, contribution and player feedback. The two-week testing phase showed promising results in terms of user engagement and produced metadata: almost 3000 tags were added, 90% of which were valid dictionary terms. We conclude that deploying metadata games on social networking platforms is a feasible method for digital archives to harness human intelligence from large shared spaces.

The thesis entitled "Social aspects of gaming on social networks" focuses on the currently much discussed topic of contemporary digital era. The introductory section presents definitions of related terms, explains the vagueness of the concept of the game on the social networks and presents several possible partitions of these games. Finally, it mentions the development of the phenomenon, whose existence is evident only in the 21st century. The middle part reflects the perception of games on social networks in the perspective of current research in the world and displays a range of gaming using the current statistics. The empirical part of the thesis includes the performance of methodology, which was laid down, by studying the available literature, to achieve the set objectives of this work. These goals are firstly, to establish player's features and find his gaming (on social network) style and, secondly, to investigate the influence of motivation on the player's gaming activity. Research is conducted on a sample of Czech population using questionnaires. The results are compared with the results of the international research for the greater complexity of the obtained image of the games on social networks. In the conclusion there are summary of the author's research and then the obvious...

Videogame tinkerers, players, and activists of the 21st century are continuing, yet redefining, the avant-garde art and literary movements of the 20th century. Videogames are diverging as a social, cultural, and digital medium. They are used as political instruments, artistic experiments, social catalysts, and personal means of expression. A diverse field of games and technocultural play, such as alternate reality games, griefer attacks, arcade sculptures, and so on, can be compared and contrasted to the avant-garde, such as contemporary tactical media, net art, video art, Fluxus, the Situationists, the work of Pollock or Brecht, Dada, or the Russian Formalists. For example, historical avant-garde painters played with perspectival space (and its traditions), rather than only within those grid-like spaces. This is similar in some ways to how game artists play with flow (and player expectations of it), rather than advancing flow as the popular and academic ideal. Videogames are not only an advanced product of technoculture, but are the space in which technoculture conventionalizes play. This makes them a fascinating site to unwork and rethink the protocols and rituals that rule technoculture. It is the audacity of imagining certain videogames as avant-garde (from the perspective of mainstream consumers and art academics alike) that makes them a good candidate for this critical experiment.

How do young adult students communicate through their smartphones today? Which applications and features do they choose? What motivates their choices for the various possible situations? In this paper we investigate which communication channels young adult students in Sweden use for private message communication in their smartphones, in what way they use the channels and why they choose specific channels for different types of communication. In Sweden today, there are numerous of different ways of communicate through smartphones. We have interviewed ten Swedish young adult students regarding their use. The results speaks for that SMS has proven to still be used very frequently, even though it has existed for many years and that there are plenty of other ways to communicate through private messages today. Social media, primarily Facebook, also attracts users to communicate through private messages with their smartphones. SMS isn’t any longer the obvious method for sending a message. By presenting the result of our study, we hope to provide for future design resolutions and to give the next generation of smartphones communication tools that are as optimal as possible.