ABSTRACT
Game jams are collaborative competitions where participants make games from scratch within a short period of time. Occasionally, these games aim to promote meaningful learning outcomes by embedding functional knowledge into entertaining and engaging gameplay. We wanted to understand if a game jam during a global pandemic could be used as an effective method to facilitate a collaborative, multidisciplinary team's ability to design, develop, and implement a serious game on a health-related topic (i.e., COVID-19). We examined the 2020 game jam hosted by the National Academy of Sciences to evaluate one method to organize a serious virtual game jam and provide a roadmap for implementation using qualitative and quantitative data collection methods to evaluate its efficacy. In addition to identifying best practices and lessons learned from our tools and processes, our results demonstrate that a virtual game jam can in fact be a powerful tool for creating a scientifically sound, population-level, big picture-thinking serious game used for health education, facilitate collaborative multidisciplinary teams and be a practical learning experience for game jammers.
ABSTRACT
In 2020 in Quebec, the COVID-19 pandemic led to the cancellation of many musical events. In addition to the concerts, it was also the jam sessions that had to stop. These events usually bring together music lovers for collective improvisation sessions framed by rules that vary depending on the location, the participants, and the genre of music. This article focuses more specifically on a community of electronic music producers and fans who have chosen to transpose into the digital environment the jam event they used to organize. Our research aims to understand what digital transposition does to collective creation and through which technical devices it materializes. In the face of both technical and organizational constraints and limitations, the meaning of the jam is evolving from music played together to music produced and composed collectively. Thus, our research shows that the will to develop a temporary collective, common project encourages participants to negotiate with the potential format of the event.
ABSTRACT
In the present digital era, technology is being extensively used as an aid to teach different skills in a language teaching course. With the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, where technology that was being used for peripheral tasks and activities in education so far, has now become pervasive in the learning spaces. Tech aids such as audio, video, internet, educational tools, etc. are the popular ones among teachers at all levels. The present study aims to explore the use of one such tool - Digital Spinning Wheel that has been used as a tool for conducting Just-a- Minute sessions in the Effective Public Speaking course being offered at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, one of the premier engineering institutes of India. The study also makes an attempt to understand students' perceptions about the appropriacy of the choice of the tool and the effectiveness of the instructional tool as used by the course instructors. For the study, a questionnaire was designed and circulated through Google Form among all the students of the course. The findings of the study suggest that the Digital Spinning Wheel makes the classroom activity interesting and dynamic and also ensures objectivity and fairness during the conduction of the evaluative component, Just-a-Minute. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Severe session jam phobia (SJP), the extent of underprivileged online education, and subsequent mental health disorders among students have emerged as distinguished global problems due to the overwhelming effects of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The purpose of this research was to evaluate the impact of extended COVID-19 lockdown and its mediating factors on current e-Learning activities, the prevalence of severe SJP and psychological distress among university students in Bangladesh. A web-based cross-sectional study was conducted to assemble responses through Google Form by applying a simple snowball sampling technique among university students aged 18 years or above in Bangladesh. All ethical considerations were maintained, and univariate, bivariate, and multivariate analyses were employed to analyze the acquired data set. Among the total analyzed data (n = 1,122), the male and female ratio was almost 1:1, and a remarkable segment (63.7%) was aged between 21-24 years. Alarmingly, around 50-60% of the students were suffering from severe SJP, prevailing underprivileged education in the e-Learning platform, and severe mental distress. Logistic regression analyses demonstrated that the students from public universities, lower- and mid-income families, lower-aged, and junior years education groups were significantly (p < 0.05) more underprivileged than their counter groups. Besides, the monthly family income and university type significantly influenced the extent of severe SJP. Finally, the students who were female, rustic, come from low-income families (below 25,000 BDT), who had academic uncertainty, job insecurity, online exam phobia, and dissatisfaction with e-Learning education, were significantly suffering from moderate to severe mental distress. The current evidence demonstrates that a substantial number of Bangladeshi university students are struggling with extreme session jam phobia, underprivileged e-Learning education, and subsequent psychological distress, which need to be immediately addressed through concerted efforts by the government, parents, and university authorities.