RESEARCH
PAPER 1:
RELEVANCE OF VIDEOGAMES IN THE
LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT OF YOUNG CHILDREN
INTRODUCTION
In today’s
world, videogames has gained a tremendous growth in all major aspects, thereby,
making its study an essential factor. Violence in the games is the major
concern. It is generally a known fact that the players of videogames (namely
children or adults), tend to incorporate the same playing style into their real
world. This paper highlights the adaptation play in a child’s growth as per the
theories proposed by Freud, Piaget and Vygotsky (Bruner, 1972A).
Following is
the statement put forth by Ian Bogost in his book “Persuasive Games”
Playing a role
in a videogame does not automatically imply validation for the behavior the
game models, As I have argued, videogames can also give players the opportunity
to empathize with people and situations they might not ordinarily encounter.
Videogames teach abstract principles that service general problem-solving skills
and learning values. It encourages the learner to experiment within knowledge domains
freely without fear of incompetence due to incomplete mastery. (p. 230-231)
Few other
statements put forth by other researchers include:
“the
game teaches players how to convert skills into strategies, and to turn failure
into success” (James Paul Gee, “Demonstrating the important Learning Found in
COTS Games”, 2004) Taking a step back from the immediate situation, analyzing
the choices and the odds, and finding the right strategy. (Beck & Wade, Got
Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever, Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard Business School Press, 2004)
Videogames
giving its capacity of communicating and submerging individuals into an
imaginary world can be used for creating a way of playing for educative entertainment, in this way it can
prevent the ambient risks that young people of 14 to 25 years old in Colombia
suffer and make their life better. (Guerrero, 2014)
PARTICIPANTS CHOSEN
For this current
research, 50 boys were chosen. On the other hand, girls of Elementary schools
belonging to 2nd, 4th and 6th classes
corresponding to 7-8, 9-10 and 12-13 age limits were also picked up. Participants
were distributed into groups of 16 ( 8 boys and 8 girls under 2nd grade), 16 (
8 boys and 8 girls under 4th grade ) and 18 ( 9 boys and 9 girls under 6th
grade ) respectively. Apart from participants functioning as players and
controllers, few extra players were always kept as handy.
INSTRUMENTS CHOSEN
Xbox360, a
console for playing games was chosen. Two numbers of TV’s in the form of flat
screen and controllers to act as joypad was present. Additionally, a video
camera was also fitted in order to record the activities and observations when
children played. Few accessories namely action figures and portal to introduce
them were also kept.
REASONS FOR CHOOSING THE DESIRED PARTICIPANTS
Children of
the desired age limits belonging to respective grades and schools were
particularly chosen to carry out this study in order to analyse and provide
solutions for the following criteria
1. Learning
behaviour of the desired age group children.
2. Both
genders were chosen to investigate whether boys or girls were more attracted to
videogames.
3. Observation
of the children’s cooperation skills by allowing them to play in pairs.
4. Observations
to know whether these children organised themselves when doing such activities.
5. To
determine how far children can learn by themselves without adult’s
intervention.
6. How far
children can solve problems themselves without asking for any kind of help.
7. Lastly, it
is to find how much a child can inter relate the play by understanding its real
meaning and apply to his/her learning capabilities to achieve and sustain their
growth.
INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT THE RESEARCH
1. Children
started playing the Skylanders game by themselves without any kind of external
help by simply using the sample tutorial present for playing the game.
2. The game
was completely new to these children. Even in such situation, they started
showing interest spontaneously so as to participate in the game immediately and
explore it.
3. The
participation rate for the game kept increasing tremendously as day and time
progressed thereby leading to formation of second group of children playing
another game under adult’s and staff’s guidance.
4.
Communication established between groups on its own without any external force.
5. Children
themselves started forming teams without any proper definition which led to
formation of meaning for the game that they played by means of collaborative
thinking.
6. Children started
sharing their experiences regarding what they discovered (positives and
negatives) during the time of play and even provided tips to their fellow mates
in making progress towards the game.
7. Skills and
knowledge were shared among the rest of the children as when any kind of
progress or mastery of the game was achieved.
8. Bruner
(1984) discovered a method named Scaffolding which is very much related to the
method proposed by Vygotsky (1979). It is defined as the Zone of Proximal
Development: the distance between what one can do alone and what one can do
with the help of someone with better skills. The child, who knows the most or
understands the game at a faster rate, will offer that knowledge to those who
are slow learners. The speed at which children started learning gradually
increased because of increase in the mutual learning system that these children
followed.
9. Some forms
of leadership roles were also exhibited by some players.
One of the
best example to depict this scenario was the presence of a 7 year old girl, who
was playing during the first few minutes of the game opted to act as a mentor
and a tutor for other children giving them her own chance to play. She even
started giving some information which was very much useful for the other
children younger in age than her to progress through the game. The most
interesting fact was that whenever she felt like playing, the younger
generation were happier to give her a chance which she would again give up
after few minutes of play. This happened throughout the research season.
10. The fact
to be noted was that no big conflicts happened during the entire play. Even
during the time when minor conflicts happened, no forms of interruption
happened making the game to be stopped completely.
11. The game
was a big success which was expressed by means of greetings from children
towards the people who conducted this research. It was also noted that children
of all the age groups who were considered for this research completely enjoyed
the whole performance.
12. A very
ingrained belief in adults, parents or teachers, is that only boys are interested
in videogames and nor girls, and that, if they are interested, the girls are
slower at learning than the boys. Various studies have shown that both gender
do play video games, although they have different preferences in the type of
videogames as shown by Greenberg et al (2010) among others. It was noted during
this study that this belief was completely false as girls played equally fast
to that of the boys.
13. Lacasa et
al (2009) describes that this capacity of self-regulation among children of
primary education. This effect got proved when children started maintaining their
own time limits and made turns among them automatically.
14. Back and
Wade (2004) have demonstrated the collaboration between group of players and
the acquisition of social skills while playing videogames. This theory also got
proved in this research as children started taking up different roles within
the group among themselves.
15. A ludic
environment established throughout the study which was very much essential to
make this research a success.
16. Children
got so much immersed within the play that they started interacting with the
figures which was within the game considering it to be a real human.
CONCLUSION
To conclude,
it is to be clearly identified, accepted and noted that this learning process
followed by the children through the means of playing games show casted their
caring, control and leadership qualities.
RESEARCH
PAPER 2:
CLASSIFYING MOVIES BASED ON AUDIENCE PERCEPTIONS:
MTI FRAMEWORK AND BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE
INTRODUCTION
Today’s
fast moving society, people are highly accelerated by systemized work which leads
to hyper anxiety tend to affects their social value and their cultural
heritages. In this situation, movies play a vital role to relaxing themselves
and ignite them to forecast their social responsibilities. Movies are cultural
artifacts which reflect the societal ethical of the country.
A Movie is a progression of pictorial
representation, when exposed on a screen, which constructs the illusion of
moving images due to the phi phenomenon. This optical illusion causes the audience to perceive
continuous motion between separate objects viewed rapidly in succession.
This research based on korean which observes the current
status of the movie genre usage in movie research and film industry and introduced
a new method to classify movies by large-scale audience survey by measure the
factors to set the Movie type indicator (MTI) . It shows the comparison between
the movies types and genres with respect to box-office revenue. Versatile
box-office revenues (opening week revenue, total revenue, and revenue-per
screen) differed significantly across movie types, whereas only the opening
week revenue showed a significant difference across movie genres, suggesting
that movie types may be a better predictor of a movie’s box-office performance
than movie genres that have been frequently used in prior research on
box-office performance prediction.
“John
Miller, managing director of J.P. Morgan Securities’ entertainment group which
owns 80% of the Hollywood’s film production loans market, doesn’t read scripts,
doesn’t care about plots,
and doesn’t worry about which
stars have signed on. But, Miller does focus on what really counts in a movie’s
success: its business plan, especially its budget, release date, genre, and
distribution schedule.” (Businessweek, February 24, 2005)
PARTICIPANTS
CHOSEN
In this research, they have selected 377
movies (both foreign and Korean) to create the movie lists forth audience
survey. These movies are from the Top 100 film lists of the Korean Box-office from
2001 to 2004, plus movies that garnered more than 100,000 admissions from 2005
to 2007 in Korea. Of the 377 movies, 230
titles (132 Korean, 98 foreign) were used.
Totally 125 students are participants who are all categorized with
respect to their degrees sort of undergraduate, graduate, and MBA of different
age groups and also participants are chosen based on their frequently movie
going behavior.
INSTRUMENTS
CHOSEN
In this research, they used paper based
survey as an instrument in which participants are motivated to complete the
open ended survey after watching their respective movies which are pre assigned
to them.
REASONS
FOR CHOSING THE DESIRED PARTICIPANTS
Perceptive of the people may vary on
different sort of age groups. In this film industry, movies are common factor
to all the age group people, so researcher chosen the participants at different
age group to set the movie type indicator.
By considered the above mentioned
factors, researchers chosen the respondents were 52% male and, in terms of age group, about 71% were in their twenties,
and 28% were in their thirties.
Somehow, movies lovers are aware of key
success criteria of the movie.In terms of
frequency of cinema-going behavior, 29% were watching movies at the theater 12
or more times a year, 31% were watching six to 11 times a year, 23% were four
or five times a year, and 17% belonged to the one to three times per year
group.
INTERESTING
FACTS ABOUT THE RESEARCH
1. One of the main interesting facts in
this paper, in which researcher narrow down the key categorization on nine series
of clusters further extends to various genres with MTI scores for each.
2. Using a large-scale audience survey data, the authors clustered
movies into 9 distinct types based on 8 audience-perceived movie characteristics
such as fun, eye-catching, discomfort, and feel-good.
3. By this, researcher validated their method by comparing movie types
vs. movie genres in terms of their box-office revenue explanatory power.
It drives movie production to build a people likable movie, results to
block-busters revenue, and also helps to increase the social standards.
CONCLUSION
As we gone through the research paper,
we have concluded that introducing MTI score to the movies reflects the
perspective of versatile people on different genres of movies which motivate
the movie directors to produce blockbuster films.
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