Alvin C. M. Kwan

Online vocabulary games as a tool for teaching and learning English vocabulary

Vocabulary learning is often perceived as boring by learners, especially for those who grew up in the digital age. This paper reports a study of the usefulness of online games in vocabulary learning for some undergraduate students. Three teachers and 100 engineering students participated in a quasi‐experimental study for approximately nine weeks. The experimental group learnt some vocabulary from two carefully selected web sites with games, while the control group learnt the same vocabulary through activity‐based lessons. A pre‐test and post‐test were conducted in the first and ninth weeks. The findings indicate that the experimental group outperformed the control group statistically in the post‐test. The students in the experimental group generally preferred online learning supplemented with digital educational games to conventional activity‐based lessons. The teachers thought highly of the online games, but they expressed concern that extra support was required if the online games were adopted as a core part of their teaching. Les jeux de vocabulaire en ligne comme outil d’enseignement et d’apprentissage du vocabulaire anglais Les apprenants et surtout ceux qui ont grandi à l’époque du numérique, trouvent souvent que l’apprentissage du vocabulaire est fastidieux. Cet article présente une étude de l’utilité des jeux en ligne dans l’apprentissage du vocabulaire pour certains étudiants de premier cycle. Trois professeurs et 100 étudiants d’ingéniérie ont participé à une étude semi expérimentale pendant neuf semaines environ. Le groupe expérimental a appris du vocabulaire à partir de deux sites Web offrant des jeux et soigneusement sélectionnés tandis que le groupe de contrôle apprenait le même vocabulaire dans des leçons fondées sur des activités. Le pre‐test et le post‐test ont été effectués au cours de la première et de la neuvième semaines. Les résultats montrent que le groupe expérimental a statistiquement obtenu de meilleurs résultats au post‐test que le groupe de contrôle. Les étudiants du groupe expérimental ont généralement préféré l’apprentissage en ligne accompagné de jeux éducatifs numériques aux leçons conventionnelles fondées sur des activités. Les professeurs ont une bonne opinion des jeux en ligne mais ils ont exprimé leur inquiétude quant à la nécessité d’un soutien supplémentaire si les jeux en ligne étaient adoptés comme élément fondamental dans leur enseignement. Online‐Vokabel‐Lernspiele als Mittel für das Lehren und Lernen englischer Vokabeln Vokabellernen wird von Anfängern oft als langweilig empfunden, besonders von jenen, die im “digitale Age” aufgewachsen sind. Dieser Beitrag berichtet über die Nützlichkeit, Online‐Spiele für das Vokabellernen bei einigen Anfänger‐Studenten einzusetzen. Drei Lehrer und 100 Technikstudenten nahmen an einer etwa neun Wochen laufenden quasi experimentellen Studie teil. Die experimentelle Gruppe lernte Vokabeln mit Hilfe zweier sorgfältig ausgewählter Web‐Sites mit Spielen, während die Kontrollgruppe dasselbe Vokabular durch aktivitätsbasierten Unterricht lernte. Vortest und Nachtest wurden in der ersten und in der neunten Wochen durchgeführt. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass im Nachtest die experimentelle Gruppe die Kontrollgruppe statistisch übertraf. Die Studenten in der experimentellen Gruppe bevorzugten im Allgemeinen das mit digitalen Lernspielen ergänzte Online‐Lernen gegenüber konventionellen aktivitätsbasierten Unterrichtsstunden. Die Lehrer bewerteten die Online‐Lernspiele hoch, drückten aber auch die Sorge aus, dass zusätzliche Unterstützung nachgefragt werden könnte, falls die Online‐Spiele als ein zentraler Teil ihres Lehrens übernommen werden würden. Los juegos de vocabulario en linea como herramientas de enseñanza y aprendizaje del vocabulario inglés El aprendizaje del vocabulario muchas veces aparece como un trabajo bastante aburrido especialmente para los alumnos de la generación digital. Este artículo presenta un estudio sobre la utilidad de los juegos en línea para el aprendizaje del vocabulario entre algunos alumnos de primer ciclo. Tres profesores y 100 estudiantes de ingeniería han participado en esa casi experimental investigación durante aproximadamente nueve semanas. El grupo experimental aprendió vocabulario por medio de juegos encontrados en dos sitios web cuidadosamente seleccionados mientras que el grupo de control aprendía el mismo vocabulario por medio de lecciones basadas en actividades. El pre‐test y el post‐test tuvieron lugar en la primera y en la novena semanas. Los resultados indican que el grupo experimental cumpló mejores estadísticas en el post‐test. En general los estudiantes del grupo experimental preferían el aprendizaje en línea entremezclado con juegos educativos digitales a las lecciones convencionales basadas en actividades. Los profesores tuvieron una excelente opinión de los juegos en linea pero expresarón su preocupación frente a la necesidad de conseguir extra soporte si los juegos en línea estuviesen adoptados como componentes esenciales de su enseñanza.

An Automated School Timetabling System Using Hybrid Intelligent Techniques

School timetabling is typically hard to resolve and the problem gets harder when teaching resources are scarce. The need for supporting stringent teaching requirements such as co-teaching and split-class teaching complicates the problem even more. In this paper, we describe an automated school timetabling system called @PT that reasons about sophisticated timetabling requirements. @PT makes use of a number of intelligent techniques including constraint technology, heuristics, local search operators, and tabu-list like data structure. It also changes its search behavior dynamically at run-time. Experimental results show that @PT is robust and manages to solve real problem instances effectively within minutes.

Making Smart Choices: A Serious Game for Sex Education for Young Adolescents

Current educational resources for sex education in Hong Kong are mainly designed to be used in classroom. They are mostly text-based and are unattractive to the most vulnerable adolescent group. As discussion on sex is still taboo in Chinese society, self-learning resources can supplement classroom teaching. This paper describes an interactive game playable on Facebook, iPad and the web to educate young adolescents with reliable knowledge and positive attitudes towards relationship and sex and life skills necessary for making wise decisions regarding love and sex in a fun way. The effectiveness and acceptance of the game were evaluated by more than 1000 grades 7-9 students from six schools. The results showed that after playing the game, students’ sex knowledge improved with a medium effect size. The students were mostly receptive to the game, finding it fun to play with and describing the content as “interesting”, “interactive”, “informative”, “close to reality” and “applicable”. Making Smart Choices: A Serious Game for Sex Education for Young Adolescents

Developing an Interactive Game Platform to Promote Learning and Teamwork on Mobile Devices: An Experience Report

In the past few years, many new development toolkits such as the Nebula2 and/or mobile technologies including the WiFi or mobileTV have opened up exciting learning opportunities on mobile devices. On top of it, new technologies continue to fuel the rapid growth of newly merged fields of research like the edutainment for educational entertainment. In a recent teaching development project, we have developed an interactive game platform to facilitate learning and more importantly the spirit of teamwork for collaborative problem-solving on desktop and pocket PCs. With the great challenges imposed by globalization, we strongly believe that learning to collaboratively analyze and then apply the ldquoappropriaterdquo knowledge to solve a specific problem is always the key to success. In this paper, we discuss about an on-going work, and share our relevant experience in system development. Furthermore, evaluation strategies will be thoroughly examined. After all, our work shed light on many interesting directions for future exploration.

A Contention-Oriented Timeslot Selection Heuristic for School Timetabling

Direct heuristic is widely used in scheduling applications, e.g., timeslot selection in school timetabling. Timeslot selection concerns which timeslot, among a number of applicable timeslots, be chosen for a yet-to-assign lesson. In this paper, we propose a timeslot selection heuristic based on the notion of timeslot contention among lessons. Due to the generality of the heuristic, it can be applied to other problem domains that involve disequality constraints such as examination timetabling problem. The new heuristic has been studied both analytically and empirically. Experimental results drawn from a set of real timetabling problem instances have shown that the new heuristic outperformed a variant of small-domain-first heuristic in terms of the timetable completion rate despite the similarity in both heuristics’ computational load.

News reading habits of young university students in Hong Kong in the Age of New Media

A number of recent studies indicated a rapid increase in the use of mobile devices and apps worldwide. Nevertheless, little research has been done on how the new media affect young adults’ reading habits. The current study addresses this research gap by studying the news reading habits of 118 young university students in Hong Kong in the Internet era. Selected key findings of the study, mainly obtained through analyzing the quantitative data from an online survey, are as follows: (1) smart phone apps were students’ most favorite news source; (2) ease of access was students’ key concern when selecting news sources; (3) students of both genders had a clear preference to local news, followed by international and China news; (4) students’ news reading habits had little to do with their personal income or their parents’ education level; (5) students read news more often and for a longer time if their families had a habit of buying printed newspaper; and (6) students spend less time in news reading when compared to the past. The study also reveals a clear uprising of new media for news access, threatening the role of traditional news sources such as printed newspapers and radio.

Applying an improved heuristic based optimiser to solve a set of challenging university timetabling problems: an experience report

University timetabling problems (UTPs) represent a class of challenging and practical constrained optimization problems with its unique requirements when compared to school timetabling. In the past, researchers had proposed different intelligent search methods, that can be generally classified as the constructive or local search methods, to automate school and/or university timetabling. In this paper, we considered a flexible local search scheme combining both min- conflicts and look-forward heuristics to effectively solve general university timetabling problems. Our search proposal augmented with a k-reset repair operator achieved impressive results when compared to that of a general finite- domain constraint solving system, namely the ZDC, on a set of challenging UTPs obtained from an international timetabling competition. A preliminary analysis of their search results was conducted. More importantly, our search proposal of combined heuristics sheds light on various directions to effectively handle other complex or large-scale scheduling problems.

Shefce: A Cantonese-English bilingual speech corpus for pronunciation assessment

This paper introduces the development of ShefCE: a Cantonese-English bilingual speech corpus from L2 English speakers in Hong Kong. Bilingual parallel recording materials were chosen from TED online lectures. Script selection were carried out according to bilingual consistency (evaluated using a machine translation system) and the distribution balance of phonemes. 31 undergraduate to postgraduate students in Hong Kong aged 20–30 were recruited and recorded a 25-hour speech corpus (12 hours in Cantonese and 13 hours in English). Baseline phoneme/syllable recognition systems were trained on background data with and without the ShefCE training data. The final syllable error rate (SER) for Cantonese is 17.3% and final phoneme error rate (PER) for English is 34.5%. The automatic speech recognition performance on English showed a significant mismatch when applying L1 models on L2 data, suggesting the need for explicit accent adaptation. ShefCE and the corresponding baseline models will be made openly available for academic research.

Towards a minimalist approach to lesson planning of an introductory database course

Research addressing learning of individual database topics is much more common than research that attempts to address broader issues in learning of database. This paper proposes a lesson planning approach for an introductory database course based on selected principles of the minimalist instructional design and the ARCS model of motivational design. The basic idea is to design action oriented lessons in a way to involve student participation as early as possible and to foster confidence of students in the learning process. The adoption of the approach results in an ordering of database topics which is significantly different from mainstream practices.