The popularity of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) has grown enormously, with communities of players reaching into the millions. Their fantasy narratives present multiple challenges created by the virtual environment and/or other players. The games' potential for education stems from the fact that players are immersed in a…

Finding appropriate interactive exercises to increase students' learning in technical topic courses is always challenging to educators. In this study, several paper plane hands-on simulation exercises were developed, used, and tested in a lean manufacturing course for beginning college students. A pretest and posttest was used to assess the…

LET'S TALK ABOUT IT (LTAI) (Lederman, Stewart, Bates, Greenberg, LeGreco, & Schuwerk, 2007), a scenario-based alcohol prevention simulation, has been used in a curriculum infusion design to promote healthy alcohol-related decision making among college students. Its use offers a unique research opportunity to explore students' beliefs and talk…

There are several strategies, or models, for combining the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) validity indicators to detect malingered psychiatric symptoms. Some scholars have recommended that an elevated F (Infrequency) score should be followed by the inspection of Fp (Infrequency-Psychopathology), whereas a recent…

Immersive virtual environments (IVEs) are potentially powerful educational resources but their application for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is under researched. This study aimed to answer two research questions: (1) Do children with ASD experience IVEs in different ways to typically developing children given their cognitive,…

This study investigated the effectiveness of computer-based video instruction (CBVI) to teach three young adults with moderate intellectual disabilities to push a "request to stop bus signal" and exit a city bus in response to target landmarks. A multiple probe design across three students and one bus route was used to evaluate effectiveness of…

The theme of EUROCALL 2014 was "CALL Design: Principles and Practice," which attracted approximately 280 practitioners, researchers and students from computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and related disciplines of more than 40 different nationalities. Over 170 presentations were delivered on topics related to this overarching…

This teaching brief presents a Microsoft® Excel simulation designed to complement and expand upon the well-known matchstick/die game introduced by Goldratt in "The Goal." This simulation performs 100 replications of a 40-period processing run for low, medium, and high levels of process variation and displays the comparative results…

In this article, the author discusses using Second Life (SL) in school librarianship. SL is a multi-user virtual environment in which persons create avatars to allow them to move and interact with other avatars. They can build and manipulate objects. To move, they can walk, run, fly, or teleport. There are many areas within SL to allow people to…

Uncertainty may be an important component of the motivation provided by learning games, especially when associated with gaming rather than learning. Three studies are reported that explore the influence of gaming uncertainty on engagement with computer-based learning games. In the first study, children (10-11 years) played a simple maths quiz.…

The authors describe the steps in the ethical decision-making process and show how employers and educators are addressing ethical gray areas using innovative simulations in order to better prepare employees and other personnel to face ethical challenges head-on. The model outlined in this article can be used as a teaching and training tool to…

The sample size determination is an important issue for planning research. However, limitations in size have seldom been discussed in the literature. Thus, how to allocate participants into different treatment groups to achieve the desired power is a practical issue that still needs to be addressed when one group size is fixed. The authors focused…

The game of Matching Pennies (MP), a simplified version of the more popular Rock, Papers, Scissors, schematically represents competitions between organisms with incentives to predict each other's behavior. Optimal performance in iterated MP competitions involves the production of random choice patterns and the detection of nonrandomness in the…

A common question in test evaluation is whether an a priori assignment of items to subtests is supported by empirical data. If the analysis results indicate the assignment of items to subtests under study is not supported by data, the assignment is often adjusted. In this study the authors compare two methods on the quality of their suggestions to…

This article explores "Second Life"[TM] (SL) from an educator's perspective. As instructional designers transform instruction from real world to SL, understanding how more traditional forms of teaching and learning transfer to the immersive spaces of virtual life may be critical. This article identifies principles of instruction for virtual worlds…