Search

• Understanding how strategic interactions influence trait evolution remains a challenge in evolutionary games. • The evolutionary RPS game investigates the evolution of three strategies under a fixed payoff matrix. • Exploring the impact of a dynamic instead of a fixed payoff matrix could change the dynamics of the game. • The adaptive RPS game, incorporating a dynamic payoff matrix, investigates how strategies change adaptively through trait evolution. The rock-paper-scissors (RPS) game is a classic model for exploring the performance of how multiple strategies interact and evolve over time. The classic RPS game assumes a fixed benefit and cost for each strategy against another one when two players meet, while its evolutionary game considers the frequency dynamics of the three strategies with each's fitness influenced by its net payoff. This may not reflect the complexity of real-world scenarios as strategies can co-adapt with each other. We introduce an adaptive RPS game that captures the dynamics of strategy densities with trait-mediated payoffs, and the adaptive dynamics of coevolving traits via incremental mutations leading to adaptively evolving payoffs. Results show that the adaptive RPS game approaches a steady state of strategy density, if any, faster than the evolutionary RPS game. The stable coexistence of all strategies in the evolutionary game can be easily destabilized in the adaptive game. Strategies that are allowed to adaptively change their traits also performed better and achieved greater strategy densities than those fixed strategies in the adaptive game. The coevolving strategies in the adaptive RPS game exhibit complex and diverse attractors in the trait space, sensitive to both initial conditions and model parameters, but exhibiting positive payoffs with greater benefits than costs. These findings highlight how adaptive games enhance strategy performance by sacrificing eco-evolutionary dynamic stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parts of this contributing article for educators was taken from a presentation given on December 1, 2022, by Dr. Patrice J. Pinder in collaboration with the University of the West Indies' (UWI) Mona Faculty of Science and Technology who hosted a UNESCO sponsored Disaster Heritage Webinar, i.e., Disaster heritage -- Jamaica National Commission for UNESCO (jncunesco.gov.jm). The webinar presentation focused specifically on natural disasters such as catastrophic storms or hurricanes like the powerful Category 5 Storm--Hurricane Dorian, which hit the Bahamas' northern islands of Abaco and Grand Bahama on September 1, 2019. Hurricane Dorian caused major damages to homes and properties, and resulted in loss of lives. The presentation and this current paper were developed as educational advisory guides to give teachers and other education professionals ideas on how to help young children to cope after natural disasters. Thus, it is important for teachers to help young children (students) to undergo various coping mechanisms in order to build resilience. Using stories/storytelling sessions, games, and comic sketches are some of the suggested tools and strategies that can be used with young children to help them better cope after psychologically disturbing events like the Bahamas' Hurricane Dorian.

The state-of-the-art literature indicates an increasing need for co-design education as it is imperative to equip future designers with the co-designing mindset. This derives from the significance of involving 'people with lived experience' in co-design processes to better meet their needs. However, the traditional design education system seems to include mostly individual designing skills, causing a lack of skills in design students to facilitate the active participation of people in co-design. This paper reports on a case study carried out in a third-year Bachelor industrial design engineering course with design students (n = 32) and design educators (n = 4) to find an effective and efficient way of preparing future designers for their role in co-design and to gain insights into design students' experience with learning about co-design. As an instructional method, a co-design workshop including the game-play, game-modding and game-design approaches is introduced. The obstacles and confusion of the design students regarding co-design and co-design education, which they have documented throughout the year on their personalised logbooks, are explained to eliminate them in the future for smoother incorporation of co-design education into design education curricula. Lastly, for future designers' mindfulness of co-design and their role as facilitators suggestions are provided such as accreditation of curriculum activities regarding co-design education.

A game of rock-paper-scissors is an interesting example of an interaction where none of the pure strategies strictly dominates all others, leading to a cyclic pattern. In this work, we consider an unstable version of rock-paper-scissors dynamics and allow individuals to make behavioural mistakes during the strategy execution. We show that such an assumption can break a cyclic relationship leading to a stable equilibrium emerging with only one strategy surviving. We consider two cases: completely random mistakes when individuals have no bias towards any strategy and a general form of mistakes. Then, we determine conditions for a strategy to dominate all other strategies. However, given that individuals who adopt a dominating strategy are still prone to behavioural mistakes in the observed behaviour, we may still observe extinct strategies. That is, behavioural mistakes in strategy execution stabilise evolutionary dynamics leading to an evolutionary stable and, potentially, mixed co-existence equilibrium. Author summary: A game of rock-paper-scissors is more than just a children's game. This type of interactions is often used to describe competition among animals or humans. A special feature of such an interaction is that none of the pure strategies dominates, resulting in a cyclic pattern. However, in wild communities such interactions are rarely observed by biologists. Our results suggest that this lack of cyclicity may stem from imperfectness of interacting individuals. In other words, we show analytically that heterogeneity in behavioural patterns may break a cyclic relationship and lead to a stable equilibrium in pure or mixed strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper aims to examine unexpected arrivals of adult-oriented digital media in the playful storied environments of Grades 1 and 2 classrooms and the possibilities such unsettling literacies may offer. Design/methodology/approach: Posthuman perspectives provide this study's theoretical grounding and methodological approach. Actor-network-theory and thinking with theory are used to examine school play with two video games and the literacies entangled in children's same game machinima productions. Findings: Explorations of transmediascapes animate entangled meaning-making practices across virtual and material childhood spaces. They provide openings for educators to understand their students' literate world-making and consider how those unsettling literacies might have a place in the classroom as generative rather than to-be-avoided contaminations. Originality/value: The theoretical and methodological engagements of this paper offer opportunities to re-consider unsettling literacy encounters as generative contaminations rather than noxious intrusions. This paper shows how, in engaging with unsettling literacies, educators may participate with children in meaningful literacy practices responding to both the tantalizing and the troubling aspects of particular transmedia.

Lucas Pope's 2013 video game Papers, Please places the player-character in the position of an immigration inspector in a fictional Eastern Bloc nation. Since its release, the game has garnered enthusiastic responses, being celebrated by critics as an essential dramatisation of the ethical di- lemmas associated with the migratory flows and fraught border politics of the post-9/11 world. However, this essay argues that this reputation must be scrutinised: for while Papers, Please indeed illustrates some of the contradictions at the heart of contemporary border policy - such as immigrant-receiving states' pragmatic application of exclusionary immigration practices that run contrary to their self-professed liberal-democratic ideals - it also engages in a 'universalising' abstraction of the border space, which limits its feasibility as a lens through which to view 2010s border discourses. Drawing from current research in Border Studies, a close reading of Pope's game illustrates how its geo-historical setting and its omission of crucial phenomena associated with the twenty-first-century border, such as the interactional processes of bordering and the existence of 'bi-cultural' borderscapes, ultimately render it a liberal-democrat- ic fantasy, according to which the conflicts engendered by the enforced geopolitical border are abstract questions of morality and ethics rather than practical socio-political questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative worldbuilding is an ideal digital writing project for promoting critical thinking about contemporary issues, developing and applying disciplinary expertise writing transfer, and building digital literacies. In the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic where the student experience was characterised by isolation, collaborative worldbuilding also offered a powerful means of building solidarity and community. This paper presents a case study of using collaborative worldbuilding for gaming to achieve key digital writing learning outcomes. The case study shows how this innovative pedagogical approach can be mapped to two key frameworks for information and digital literacies: the Digital Competence Framework for Citizens and the Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education of the Association of College and Research Libraries. The case study also illustrates how a MediaWiki installation can be used for worldbuilding and as a means of critically introducing students to Wikipedia itself. Qualitative feedback from the students shows that the class achieved its key learning outcomes. More importantly, student engagement during the class and their feedback ascertains that collaborative worldbuilding is a powerful means of building connections and empathy between students in the context of isolation, amid a global pandemic.

This paper analyzes the relationship between proportional reasoning and understanding fair games in Costa Rican students. We conducted a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the answers to six items on comparing ratios of increasing difficulty level and another item on prize estimation in a fair game. We describe the strategies employed and the semiotic conflicts detected in 292 Costa Rican students from Grades 6 to 10 (11-16-year-olds), comparing the findings with those established in previous research. The results show an increase in the level of proportional reasoning with the grade, although the age at which the higher levels are reached is lower than that assumed by Noelting. The percentage of students applying correct strategies in the fair game problem also increases with grade, and a relationship between the understanding of fair game and the level of proportional reasoning is observed.

Computational thinking is a necessary skill for the 21st century. While previously examined in computer-rich settings, researchers are increasingly studying computational thinking in unplugged environments such as board games. Focusing on the African board game "Songo," this study shows that computational thinking practices are embedded in "Songo" board gameplay and interact with the cultural context. The study also reveals a computing practice peculiar to "Songo" gameplay, songoputation. This paper suggests that researchers can benefit from exploring computational thinking and computing practices beyond board games in western contexts.

Board gaming is a popular activity, growing despite all the pressures of digitalization. People are gathering to play socially. Besides this ludic movement, modern board games can be used directly or adapted to achieve other goals beyond entertainment, approaching serious game methods as a modding exercise. This paper describes a process where a facilitator selected a sequence of modern board games (mostly party games) and played them with the employees of an enterprise (design and marketing) during an informal meeting. The games were played in a restaurant, in an environment, testing whether participants could recognize learning and training utility. The game facilitator observed the game dynamics and collected participants' comments during gameplay and debriefing. Participants recognized the activity as a pleasant learning and training informal session. The author argues that these informal playable learning spaces can be beneficial for institutions that wish to foster them because participants would train, learn, and strengthen social bonds.

The Rock–scissors–paper game has been studied to account for cyclic behaviour under various game dynamics. We use a two-person parametrised version of this game. The cyclic behaviour is observed near a heteroclinic cycle, in a heteroclinic network, with two nodes such that, at each node, players alternate in winning and losing. This cycle is shown to be as stable as possible for a wide range of parameter values. The parameters are related to the players' payoff when a tie occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their dual roles of teacher and librarian, school librarians have been presented with two new sets of standards that challenge them to redefine how they approach education. AASL's Standards for the 21st-Century Learner take a broad approach to address many of the fundamental skills that make students effective and self-efficient learners. Inquiry, critical thinking, reflection, and a social awareness are the driving forces behind AASL's standards. The upcoming Common Core Standards, on the other hand, attempt to scale back the sheer volume of concepts being covered over the course of the year to exploring fewer, more-fundamental concepts in greater depth. With an eye on college and career readiness, the new Common Core Standards seek to establish fluency in the fundamentals with a shift toward experience-based application at the secondary level and an emphasis on the importance of literacy experiences across all curricular areas. This shift in standards invites to the table immersive learning experiences that provide complex interactions, and an authentic solicitation of the manipulation and application of content and skills. Modern board games, with their inclusive nature, shortened playing time, complexity, and strong intrinsic motivational potential are an answer to the type of learning situations needed. In this article, the author explores how the game experience aligns with these new standards by examining a few selected common beliefs and standards from AASL and interweaving concepts from the new Common Core Standards where relevant.

This paper focuses on a fairly new motivational technique, the so-called Gamification, which consists of introducing game mechanics in non-game environments to promote motivation and engagement. By the turn of the 21rst century, Gamification took off in the business field and soon after became an attractive concept for researchers and professionals in education as it appears to be an increasingly popular method to motivate learners. Nevertheless, it is still a nascent field in terms of empirical evidence available to firmly support its educational benefits. This paper intends to shed some more light on this topic through a comprehensive review of literature published in the most prominent journals. The present study is framed within the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in higher education and Computer-Assisted Language Learning, and focuses on the effects of gamified learning environments on student's motivation and learning. A Meta-analysis method was used to explore relevant empirical research published between 2011 and 2019. After reviewing a corpus of 68 papers drawn from the leading databases Scopus and Web Of Science, and from which only 15 could be included in the study, we can point out two main findings: (i) there is still very limited literature in the field of SLA and, (ii) results seem to be predominantly positive in terms of motivation and engagement but only a few studies confirm clear interconnections with learning outcomes. The results suggest a lack of solid correlations between Gamification, motivation and cognitive processes.

Christopher Bensch is vice president for collections and chief curator at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY. He oversees the acquisition of and care for the world's most comprehensive collection of playthings. He also serves as the primary spokesperson for the National Toy Hall of Fame. Andrew Borman is digital games curator at The Strong. He collects digital games and coordinates the museum's digital game preservation efforts. Michelle Parnett-Dwyer is curator at The Strong. She collects and interprets a comprehensive collection of toys and dolls. Nic Ricketts is curator at The Strong. He acquires and interprets the museum's collection of board games, puzzles, and other nonelectronic games, as well as photographs, art, and paper ephemera. In this interview, The Strong's curators discuss the impact of the pandemic on play and the museum's collecting and preservation efforts.

As president of Little Big Horn College, David Yarlott writes that he had the good fortune to be involved in several events with Indigenous peoples from other countries. He has participated in several World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium (WINHEC) conferences and also a World Indigenous Peoples Conference on Education (WIPCE). The events took him to Kananaskis, Alberta in Canada; Honolulu, Hawai'i; Cloquet, Minnesota; and Cusco, Peru in South America. One event included travel to Cuiaba, Brazil, for the Brazilian Indigenous Games in 2013. In this article he writes that attending the different conferences gave him a view from the outside looking in. He was able to observe presentations on best practices-the "diamonds of success"-for different educational programs and projects of Indigenous nations from many parts of the world. Of course these presentations provide information on the challenges and struggles overcome to make their programs successful. Such presentations do not do justice to the intimate challenges and successes these programs have incurred. Yarlott relates in this article two things he remembers as particularly impressive at these conferences: (1) the passion, commitment, and energy the presenters have regarding their work; and (2) their dedication to preserving their respective traditions, cultures, and languages.