ABSTRACT
This innovative practice full paper describes sustainability teaching through game-based activities in engineering classrooms for potentially enhancing student interest in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. Meta-analytic research indeed supports that gamification enhances student learning by increasing engagement and motivation, promoting goal setting behaviors and supporting the need for recognition. While there is a high scope for utilizing game-based tools to help students connect with global sustainability challenges, literature reflects a scarcity of such innovative pedagogical tools in engineering education. To tackle this challenge, we introduced interactive game-based modules to teach sustainability within two different education cultural contexts - one in the U.S. as a part of a Honours course at a large public university, and one in India, as a part of the first year engineering curriculum at a small private university.To broaden the outlook of engineering students towards sustainability, our game-based activity learning outcomes for students were to: 1) contextualize sustainability and its importance in contemporary global issues 2) recognize how Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) could be interrelated, 3) explain how change in entropy and our actions can affect sustainability. To facilitate these broad learning outcomes, we developed two interactive gamified activities and implemented them online (due to COVID-based shift to instruction) in two different engineering institutions. This innovation article reports the design of two gamified activities used to teach sustainability, and studies its impact on student learning outcomes through SDT framework of motivation and thematic analysis of student reflections. We used surveys and minute paper to record student perceptions which were analyzed thematically. Results indicated that students enjoyed these games, saw value in peer learning, and simultaneously developed a deeper, more contextual understanding of sustainability by perceiving the interconnections between SDGs and ways in which entropy through their everyday actions influence sustainability. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
In an ordered community, a society's population is evident in public gathering spaces. Meeting people in such places is done deliberately on particular events, but in times when it is not needed or when the capacity of a place is met, it becomes difficult to mass plan a population's visit. There must be a mechanism to distribute the population over space and time. A collaborative effort to make sure that the crowd density is as low as it can be for the sake of certain problems such as traffic, parking space, pandemics, or natural disasters needs to be made by crowdsourcing information. To overcome these problems, showing the population a real-time map of the crowd density in an area over time is one way to curb crowds by voluntary action. In this paper, we present a system of two applications for this purpose. A desktop application which, with the help of CCTV cameras, counts the people in an area and projects that number onto a map, and a mobile application which, with the help of location sensors, will project each user's location alone on the same map. The crowding is evident on a map and hence tells the users the crowd density in an area. © 2022 American Institute of Physics Inc.. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Background: COVID-19 pandemic has produced a great impact in the STEMI (ST Elevation Myocardial Infarction) care systems across the world. Patient hesitancy to seek medical attention for suspected STEMI, necessity of the health care systems to prioritize COVID-19 care, safety concerns of health care workers etc., have brought in unprecedented times for both patients and health care workers. The impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the establishment of a STEMI care system is less known Purpose: To identify the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on a developing public STEMI care system in a low-middle income country in Asia, with reference to the type of reperfusion offered and outcome. Methods: Data on number of STEMI admissions, type of reperfusion therapy and outcome are being collected from 12 teaching hospitals as a part of a developing public regional STEMI care system based on a hub and spoke model in a low middle-income country from August 2018. These 12 thrombolysis only hospitals were being upgraded as primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI) capable hub hospitals in 2019. Though the hassles of COVID-19 pandemic affected this process significantly, daily data collection in our STEMI care system continued. The maximal COVID impacted period in 2020 was identified from the online database (1) as from April to December 2020. The number, type of reperfusion and outcome of the STEMI patients treated during this period were compared to the same data collected during April-December 2019. Results: A total of 13,137 STEMI patients were treated in our system during the two time periods April to December 2019 and April to December 2020. There was a 13.3% drop in the number of STEMI treated in 2020, compared to the number treated in 2019 (6101 vs 8925;P<0.001). This drop was in proportion to the number of new cases of COVID-19 reported in our state (Fig. 1a) We also noted a significant drop in the rate of PPCI and Pharmaco-invasive therapy (PIT) offered for STEMI in 2020 compared to 2019 in the same period (PPCI: 0.13% vs 5.9%-P<0.001 and PIT 0.64% vs 11%- P<0.001). This decrease in PPCI and PIT for STEMI also corresponded to the increase in number of new cases of COVID-19 reported (Fig. 1b). More patients received thrombolytic therapy for STEMI in 2020 compared to 2019 (73.6 vs 61.2% P<0.001). There was no change in the mortality of STEMI during this period. (Fig. 2) Conclusion: We found a significant drop in number of patients seeking medical care for STEMI during COVID-19 pandemic. There was significant drop in the rate of PPCI and PIT offered in our STEMI care system. Thrombolytic therapy remained the predominant mode of reperfusion as before, but with a significant increased rate of thrombolysis. There was no change in mortality rate in STEMI patients. Thrombolytic therapy is an acceptable mode of reperfusion, when the balance of a STEMI care system is disturbed by extraneous influences like the COVID-19 pandemic.