Education Commons^™

The Design, Development, And Determination Of A Virtual Reality Classroom, Victoria Alexxis Reddington

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically changed the way students learn and engage with their peers and instructors. Likewise, instructors have had to quickly transform their course materials to suit the online classroom format. Results from a survey of students and instructors at the University of Denver revealed that perceived levels of learning and collaboration were lessened with the transition to online learning. Moreover, the sense of presence in an educational atmosphere with other individuals was reported to be significantly stronger in a real physical classroom, as compared to an online classroom. This thesis therefore seeks to provide a new, alternative …

Studying Facial Expression Recognition And Imitation Ability Of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder In Interaction With A Social Robot, Farzaneh Askari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) experience limited abilities in recognizing non-verbal elements of social interactions such as facial expressions [1]. They also show deficiencies in imitating facial expressions in social situations. In this Master thesis, we focus on studying the ability of children with ASD in recognizing facial expressions and imitating the expressions using a rear-projected expressive humanoid robot, called Ryan. Recent studies show that social robots such as Ryan have great potential for autism therapy. We designed and developed three studies, first to evaluate the ability of children with ASD in recognizing facial expressions that are presented to …

Toward Using Games To Teach Fundamental Computer Science Concepts, Jeffrey Michael Edgington

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Video and computer games have become an important area of study in the field of education. Games have been designed to teach mathematics, physics, raise social awareness, teach history and geography, and train soldiers in the military. Recent work has created computer games for teaching computer programming and understanding basic algorithms.

We present an investigation where computer games are used to teach two fundamental computer science concepts: boolean expressions and recursion. The games are intended to teach the concepts and not how to implement them in a programming language.

For this investigation, two computer games were created. One is designed …