University of Wyoming Open Journals
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Cask of Amontillado Digital Escape Room
No full textThis instructional session centered on cultivating students’ critical thinking and problem-solving abilities while enhancing comprehension of Edgar Allan Poe's (1846) "The Cask of Amontillado." Conducted within a 10th-grade classroom setting, the session empowered students to discern and engage with the text's pivotal themes and concepts through an immersive digital escape room experience. This article elaborates on the preparatory activities that preceded the escape room and the instructional approach employed during the escape room activity. The activity served as a formative assessment within a broader unit addressing short stories
Learning game design while playing games: A Game Design Crash Course
No full textThis course investigated game design competencies of graduate students as they engaged in gameplay and learned about game-related concepts, including gamified approaches, game-based learning (GBL), design thinking, maker technologies, and game designs. Students were introduced to the week's topic beforehand and collaborated on design projects during class sessions. Students played a different game each week, focusing mainly on game mechanics. Through the utilization of foundational readings, video tutorials, discussions, assignments, and guidance from the instructor and a guest speaker, students developed a comprehensive understanding of game design principles. This understanding ultimately led them to design both board and video games. No prior programming or game design experience was necessary
Experiential Learning in Higher Education
No full textKolb’s (1984) experiential learning theory explains how to turn a four-stage cycle that relies on concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation into effective learning. This unit, intended for university students, is designed to teach this theory through implementation. The learners progress through the four stages in Kolb’s theory while learning to fold an origami paper crane. Each stage requires the learner to reflect and share their discoveries in an online video discussion forum. The lesson concludes with a reflection on the process of learning to fold a paper crane and on learner’s understanding of experiential learning in practice
Introduction: Games, Gamification, and Virtual Environments
No full textWelcome to the games, gamification, and virtual environments special issue of the Journal of Technology-Integrated Lessons and Teaching (JTILT). Why a special issue on games? Because games have merit! Games can be played by anyone, can provide safe ways to practice essential skills, and can adapt to various interests and settings.
As more states and nations require computational thinking skills in P-12 education, connections between games and problem solving, algorithmic thinking, decomposition, and abstraction become visible. Players demonstrate these problem-solving skills when considering the probability of success with certain moves, character placement to minimize damage, or fine-tuning resources to maximize gains. The variation in complexity, type, genre, time requirements, player interactions, and so forth helps make games so popular. Individuals can locate the exemplars that match their interests
Unraveling Author’s Purpose: 5th Graders Step into the Role of Creator!
No full textIn this lesson, students demonstrate an understanding of author’s purpose by developing their own narrative and bringing it to life with Bloxels, a platform/app and physical kit for people to build their own video games. This lesson is a progressive activity where students apply what they learned about the authors' purpose, according to TEKs Guide (n.d.) ELA.5.10, and create a narrative. Students are divided into groups and given a base “setting.” They can expand this setting to fit their narrative using the included Bloxels Planning Materials. Groups plan their narrative, design key scenes using Bloxels, and narrate them using a consistent viewpoint. Students are expected to include: text (script, setting description, character descriptions), graphics/images, point of view, anecdote or hyperbole, figurative language
Periodic two-dimensional descriptor systems
No full textIn this note, we analyze the compatibility conditions of 2D descriptor systems with periodic coefficients and we derive a special coordinate system in which these conditions reduce to simple matrix commutativity conditions. We also show that the compatibility of the different trajectories in such a periodic 2D descriptor system can elegantly be formulated in terms of so-called matrix relations of regular pencils, which were introduced in [Benner and Byers. An arithmetic for matrix pencils: Theory and new algorithms. Numer. Math., 103(4):539-573, 2006]. We then show that these ideas can be extended to multidimensional periodic descriptor systems and briefly discuss the difference between the case of complex and real coefficient matrices
The Moore-Penrose inverse of the distance matrix of a helm graph
No full textIn this paper, we give necessary and sufficient conditions for a real symmetric matrix and, in particular, for the distance matrix of a helm graph to have their Moore-Penrose inverses as the sum of a symmetric Laplacian-like matrix and a rank-one matrix. As a consequence, we present a short proof of the inverse formula, given by Goel (Linear Algebra Appl. 621:86-104, 2021), for when is even. Further, we derive a formula for the Moore-Penrose inverse of singular that is analogous to the formula for . Precisely, if is odd, we find a symmetric positive semi-definite Laplacian-like matrix of order and a vector such that\begin{eqnarray*}D(H_n)^{\dagger} = -\frac{1}{2}L +\frac{4}{3(n-1)}\mathbf{w}\mathbf{w^{\prime}},\end{eqnarray*}where the rank of is . We also investigate the inertia of
‘Typical characters under typical circumstances’: The Slum Fiction of Dorothy Hewett and Ruth Park
No full textIn this article I compare the representation of working people in two novels, Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South (1948) and Dorothy Hewett’s Bobbin Up (1959), as well as the ensuing critical debate about realism in their depictions of slum life in Sydney. I show that while Hewett’s work is more class-conscious and agitational, Park’s novel comes alive in deeper intersectional ways through her awareness of the interwoven structures of gender, class and race. Although Hewett’s novel culminates in a strike by women mill workers, Park reveals more of the individual strategies of survival that form part of the working-class lives she portrays. Thus, using Friedrich Engels’ critical point about ‘typical characters under typical circumstances’, I argue that while both writers try to capture the fundamental experience of working-class people, this is more successfully done in Park’s novel, both in terms of its literary realism and implicit radical politics
Invisible Laborers: A storied love letter to other working-class mothers in academia
No full textThis paper began from my own desire to see the words of other working-class mothers in academia, to find the proof of our existence. I use autoethnography, or scholarly personal narrative, to nest my own stories of being a working-class mother within earlier scholars’ (Leeb, 2004) observations of the particular ways classism targets working-class women in academia. I also draw from Tiffe’s (2014) observations of the strengths of working-class people, in our abilities to disrupt the neoliberal university’s relationships to time, care, and bodies, and consider how working-class mothers in academia enact these disruptions through our presence