Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Sustainable Futures-Integrating Indigenous Perspectives Into An Environmental Assessment Framework: An Analysis Of The Mauri Model, Anna Bettini

Journal of Environmental Sustainability

The twin concepts of sustainable development and sustainability have been key points in new policies. Nonetheless, only the Western scientific perspective is typically considered, excluding other voices and leading to a very narrow vision of “sustainability”. The following article investigates the benefits to including indigenous knowledge and principles, considering their values rather than limitations and presents two specific case studies using the Mauri Model Decision Making Framework, a tool applied for environmental assessment, seen as a more cultural-friendly sustainable approach.

A Mathematical Model Of Juvenile Delinquency In The New York State, Oluwasegun Micheal Ibrahim

Articles

This report presents a mathematical model of juvenile delinquency in the New York State. In particular, we develop a juvenile delinquency system of non-linear differential equations using the mathematical epidemiology framework. In constructing this model, we assume that juvenile delinquency can be studied as a socially infectious disease. The stability of the juvenile delinquency-free equilibrium of the model is examined using the standard non-linear dynamical systems theory technique. We carried out a data fitting based on real-life data from the New York State Criminal Justice Services. The research result reveals that the formulated model conforms with the available data and …

Collaborative Constructions: Designing High School History Curriculum With The Lost & Found Game Series, Owen Gottlieb, Shawn Clybor

Articles

This chapter addresses design research and iterative curriculum design for the Lost & Found games series. The Lost & Found card-to-mobile series is set in Fustat (Old Cairo) in the twelfth century and focuses on religious laws of the period. The first two games focus on Moses Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, a key Jewish law code. A new expansion module which was in development at the time of the fieldwork described in this article that introduces Islamic laws of the period, and a mobile prototype of the initial strategy game has been developed with support National Endowment for the Humanities. The …

Setting The Scene For Community-Based Learning: Creative Writing As A Platform For Inquiry And Integrative Learning, Adam Watkins

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Creative writing pedagogy has received a surge of critical interest of late, though much remains to be said about its capacity to support trans-disciplinary learning outcomes, such as those related to community-based learning. Through an assessment of a place-based course focused on community-based learning, this article provides evidence that creative writing assignments can be an effective learning tool for cultivating community engagement and intercultural competencies. The educational value of creative writing, this study shows, has much to do with its unique mode of inquiry, which is well suited for integrating diverse perspectives, multi-modal research, and multiple ways of knowing.

Ikkuma: An Artistic Vr Storytelling Experience, Yangli Liu

Frameless

Ikkuma is an interactive storytelling experience utilizing Tilt Brush and Unity. It is about a land being swallowed by the sea, where conflict cracks ice and fire tears families apart. Ikkuma is the Inuvialuit word for fire, a central element to the work. The fundamental theme of Ikkuma is global warming and its impact on the Arctic ecosystem. The players must learn to tame the fire in their hearts and the Inuit traditional knowledge if they hope to survive the harsh yet fragile Arctic tundra.

Designing Blended Experiences: Laugh Traders Design Fiction, Brian J. Okeefe

Frameless

The increasing ubiquity of interactions that involve complementary digital content, physical objects, and spaces, brings about new challenges for designers. There is a need to embed designs in legacy systems, whether those are existing physical structures or existing digital platforms. Traditional approaches to product design, interaction design, and user experience design often do not take this new context into account. Many systems do not consider how designers produce new digital and physical experiences that work harmoniously, while supporting new interactions and relationships with people (Imaz and Benyon 2007; Jetter, Geyer, Schwarz & Reiterer 2012). To address this, we propose the …

Playing At The Crossroads Of Religion And Law: Historical Milieu, Context And Curriculum Hooks In Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This chapter presents the use of Lost & Found – a purpose-built tabletop to mobile game series – to teach medieval religious legal systems. The series aims to broaden the discourse around religious legal systems and to counter popular depiction of these systems which often promote prejudice and misnomers. A central element is the importance of contextualizing religion in period and locale. The Lost & Found series uses period accurate depictions of material culture to set the stage for play around relevant topics – specifically how the law promoted collaboration and sustainable governance practices in Fustat (Old Cairo) in twelfth-century …

Minecrafting Bar Mitzvah: Two Rabbis Negotiating And Cultivating Learner-Driven Inclusion Through New Media., Owen Gottlieb

Articles

In 2013, a boy with special needs used the video game Minecraft to deliver the sermon at his bar mitzvah at a Reform synagogue, an apparently unique ritual phenomenon to this day. Using a narrative inquiry approach, this article examines two rabbis’ negotiations with new media, leading up to, during, and upon reflection after the event. The article explores acceptance, innovation, and validation of new media in religious practice, drawing on Campbell’s (2010) framework for negotiation of new media in religious communities. Clergy biography, philosophy, and institutional context all impact the negotiations with new media. By providing context of a …

Children’S Ethno-National Flag Categories In Three Divided Societies, Edona Maloku, Jocelyn B. Dautel, Ana Tomovska Misoska, Laura K. Taylor

Articles

Flags are conceptual representations that can prime nationalism and allegiance to one’s group. Investigating children’s understanding of conflict-related ethno-national flags in divided societies sheds light on the development of national categories. We explored the development of children’s awareness of, and preferences for, ethno-national flags in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, and the Republic of North Macedonia. Children displayed early categorization of, and ingroup preferences for, ethno-national flags. By middle-childhood, children’s conflict-related social categories shaped systematic predictions about other’s group-based preferences for flags. Children of minority-status groups demonstrated more accurate flag categorization and were more likely to accurately infer others’ flag preferences. While …

Designing Analog Learning Games: Genre Affordances, Limitations And Multi-Game Approaches, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Articles

This chapter explores what the authors discovered about analog games and game design during the many iterative processes that have led to the Lost & Found series, and how they found certain constraints and affordances (that which an artifact assists, promotes or allows) provided by the boardgame genre. Some findings were counter-intuitive. What choices would allow for the modeling of complex systems, such as legal and economic systems? What choices would allow for gameplay within the time of a class-period? What mechanics could promote discussions of tradeoff decisions? If players are expending too much cognition on arithmetic strategizing, could that …

Acts Of Meaning, Resource Diagrams, And Essential Learning Behaviors: The Design Evolution Of Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Articles

Lost & Found is a tabletop-to-mobile game series designed for teaching medieval religious legal systems. The long-term goals of the project are to change the discourse around religious laws, such as foregrounding the prosocial aspects of religious law such as collaboration, cooperation, and communal sustainability. This design case focuses on the evolution of the design of the mechanics and core systems in the first two tabletop games in the series, informed by over three and a half years’ worth of design notes, playable prototypes, outside design consultations, internal design reviews, playtests, and interviews.

Jewish Time Jump: New York, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Jewish Time Jump: New York (Gottlieb & Ash, 2013) is a place-based mobile augmented reality game and simulation that takes the form of a situated documentary. Players take on the role of time traveling reporters tracking down a story “lost to time” to bring back to their editor at the Jewish Time Jump Gazette. The game is played in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, New York City. Players’ iPhones become their time traveling device and companion. Based on the player’s GPS location, players receive digital images from their location from over a hundred years in the past as well …

Re-Playing Maimonides’ Codes: Designing Games To Teach Religious Legal Systems, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Lost & Found is a game series, created at the Initiative for

Religion, Culture, and Policy at the Rochester Institute of

Technology MAGIC Center.1 The series teaches medieval

religious legal systems. This article uses the first two games

of the series as a case study to explore a particular set of

processes to conceive, design, and develop games for learning.

It includes the background leading to the author's work

in games and teaching religion, and the specific context for

the Lost & Found series. It discusses the rationale behind

working to teach religious legal systems more broadly, then

discuss the …

The Lost & Found Game Series: Teaching Medieval Religious Law In Context, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context. The Lost & Found project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy. The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & Found …

Prosocial Religion And Games: Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Articles

In a time when religious legal systems are discussed without an understanding of history or context, it is more important than ever to help widen the understanding and discourse about the prosocial aspects of religious legal systems throughout history. The Lost & Found (www.lostandfoundthegame.com) game series, targeted for an audience of teens through twentysomethings in formal, learning environments, is designed to teach the prosocial aspects of medieval religious systems—specifically collaboration, cooperation, and the balancing of communal and individual/family needs. Set in Fustat (Old Cairo) in the 12th century, the first two games in the series address laws in Moses Maimonides’ …

Finding Lost & Found: Designer’S Notes From The Process Of Creating A Jewish Game For Learning, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article provides context for and examines aspects of the design process of a game for learning. Lost & Found (2017a, 2017b) is a tabletop-to-mobile game series designed to teach medieval religious legal systems, beginning with Moses Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (1180), a cornerstone work of Jewish legal rabbinic literature. Through design narratives, the article demonstrates the complex design decisions faced by the team as they balance the needs of player engagement with learning goals. In the process the designers confront challenges in developing winstates and in working with complex resource management. The article provides insight into the pathways the team …

Introduction: Jewish Gamevironments – Exploring Understanding With Playful Systems, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

The study of Judaism, Jewish civilizationi, and games is currently comprised of projects of a rather small set of game scholars. A sample of our work is included in this issue.

Card Tricks: A Workflow For Scalability And Dynamic Content Creation Using Paper2d And Unreal Engine 4, Owen Gottlieb, Dakota Herold, Edward Amidon

Presentations and other scholarship

In this paper, we describe the design and technological methods of

our dynamic sprite system in Lost & Found, a table-top-to-mobile

card game designed to improve literacy regarding prosocial

aspects of religious legal systems, specifically, collaboration and

cooperation. Harnessing the capabilities of Unreal Engine’s

Paper2D system, we created a dynamic content creation pipeline

that empowered our game designers so that they could rapidly

iterate on the game’s systems and balance externally from the

engine. Utilizing the Unreal Blueprint component system we were

also able to modularize each actor during runtime as data may be

changed. The technological approach behind Lost …

New Design Principles For Mobile History Games, Owen Gottlieb

Presentations and other scholarship

This study draws on design-based research on an ARIS–based mobile augmented reality game for teaching early 20th century history. New design principles derived from the study include the use of supra-reveals, and bias mirroring. Supra-reveals are a kind of foreshadowing event in order to ground historical happenings in the wider enduring historical understanding. Bias mirroring refers to a nonplayer character echoing back a player’s biased behavior, in order to open the player to listening to alternative perspectives. Supra-reveals engendered discussion of historical themes early in the game experience. The results showed that use of a cluster of NPC bias mirroring …

Time Travel, Labour History, And The Null Curriculum: New Design Knowledge For Mobile Augmented Reality History Games, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This paper presents a case study drawn from design-based research (DBR) on a mobile, place-based augmented reality history game. Using DBR methods, the game was developed by the author as a history learning intervention for fifth to seventh graders. The game is built upon historical narratives of disenfranchised populations that are seldom taught, those typically relegated to the 'null curriculum'. These narratives include the stories of women immigrant labour leaders in the early twentieth century, more than a decade before suffrage. The project understands the purpose of history education as the preparation of informed citizens. In paying particular attention to …

Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber, Kelly Murdoch-Kitt

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context.

The Lost & Found games project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy.

The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & …

Design-Based Research Mobile Gaming For Learning Jewish History, Tikkun Olam, And Civics, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

How can Design-Based Research (DBR) be used in the study of video games, religious literacy, and learning? DBR uses a variety of pragmatically selected mixed methods approaches to design learning interventions. Researchers, working with educators and learners, design and co-design learning artifacts and environments. They analyze those artifacts and environments as they are used by educators and learners, and then iterate based on mixed methods data analysis. DBR is suited for any "rich contextualized setting in which people have agency." (Hoadley 2013) such as formal or informal learning environments.

The case covered in this chapter is a mobile Augmented Reality …

An Examination Of Accessible Hands-On Science Learning Experiences, Self-Confidence In One’S Capacity To Function In The Sciences, And Motivation And Interest In Scientific Studies And Careers., Mick D. Isaacson, Cary Supalo, Michelle Michaels, Alan Roth

Journal of Science Education for Students with Disabilities

This study examined the potential relationship of accessible hands-on science learning experiences to the development of positive beliefs concerning one’s capacity to function in the sciences and motivation to consider science as a college major and career. Findings from Likert survey items given before and after engaging in accessible hands-on science laboratories show that students who were blind or had low vision (BLV) were more likely to agree with the following items after engaging in accessible science experiences: 1) I plan on enrolling as a science major in college; 2) My educational experiences, so far, have given me the …

Case Study Two: Jewish Time Jump: New York, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Gottlieb presents an early case study of his mobile augmented reality game Jewish Time Jump: New York design on the ARIS platform for the iPhone and iPad (iOS). The game is set on-location in Washington Square Park in New York city. Players in 5th-7th grade take on the role of time-traveling reporters, landing on site on the eve of the Uprising of 20,000, the largest women-led strike in U.S. History. Based on their GPS location they receive media from over 100 years in the past, interactive with digital characters as they work to gather a story for the fictional Jewish …