National University, Philippines

It has grown into a habit over time to purchase paint to test it out or in anticipation that it would exactly match the desired output. However, this is not always the case. Some paint colors are good on palette but when applied onto walls will either not really match the existing furniture, or does not fit the ambiance of the area, or does not resonate to the owner once already applied. This common issue among homeowners and even interior designers is quite costly and time consuming. Augmented reality (AR) technology has the potential to help and completely change how homeowners choose color schemes in the field of home remodeling and decorating. Hence the development of PaintAR. With such, homeowners can see how various paint colors will look in their own living spaces without actually painting the walls using an AR-based wall paint visualizer mobile application. As a result, homeowners can choose colors more wisely before beginning their remodeling or decorating projects, which can save a significant amount of time and money. This study is a course requirement of students for mobile programming and during the conduct, the developers partnered with a popular paint brand in the country to get a complete paint color palette that is available in the market. Android studio was used in the development and the final product was tested by representatives from the paint company, interior designers, homeowners, and other prospective users in terms of functionality, usability, reliability, performance, and supportability or FURPS [1] testing and interpreted using 5-point Likert scale [2]. Results showed a general mean of 4.53 from all respondents interpreted as Excellent. With PaintAR, users can guarantee that the chosen paint color will fit the area as expected, eliminating the test painting that is costly, time consuming, and physically exhausting. The entire study is a good experience in analyzing, designing, developing, and testing mobile applications, while actually creating an one that addresses paint testing.

The rehabilitation of legacy mines continues to be a big challenge because of the difficulties in returning them to safe and stable conditions and ensuring that the mined-out areas become productive to support the economic activity of the host community. Previous efforts are often focused on purely technical and environmental aspects, leading to resistance from the local community due to their exclusion from the rehabilitation process. To address the issues associated with legacy mines and lack of participation of the community, we have developed a project, Biodiversity Positive Mining For The Net Zero Challenge (Bio + Mine), focusing on the abandoned Sto. Niño copper mine (Benguet, Philippines). The mine was closed in 1982 without a plan involving local stakeholders and leaving a significant ongoing negative legacy. Using the social-ecological-technological system framework, we will explore the intersections of the structure and functions of socio-economicdemographic, ecological, and technological data useful in devising a more inclusive mitigation strategy for the reconstruction of the supporting ecosystem. We aim to develop a site-specific system, underpinned by the local community's knowledge and practices, that can be a model for wider implementation in other legacy and active mines worldwide.

Facebook confession pages have become a popular platform in numerous universities in the Philippines, enabling college students to share experiences, thoughts, and emotions anonymously. However, the vast content on these pages makes understanding the underlying themes and patterns in the posts challenging. This study collected textual contents from the Facebook confession pages of (14) local universities in the Philippines from 2018-2022 using Scrapestorm. After collection and several preprocessing techniques, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a topic modeling algorithm, was applied to analyze the themes in the collected dataset. The results of the analysis revealed (2) general topics related to the social relationships and personal experiences of college students. On the other hand, (5) underlying issues were discussed in the discourses and posts from the confession pages, including:' confessing vulnerabilities,' ranting about daily struggles,' opinions on political events," sharing success stories,' and even' sharing sensitive topics.' Also, the analysis revealed (5) terminologies that frequently co-occurred, such as' shout-out,' 'crush-kita,' 'wanna say,' 'mental health,' and 'face-face,' which depict different topics discourses of college students in the Philippines.

The main objective of internship programs of every university is to enable students to learn the skills needed in a workplace regardless of the modality. Students want to experience the actual work environment in preparation for joining the knowledge workers after finishing the program. With the disruptions in education due to the pandemic, universities are trying to redesign the modality of the delivery of instruction and the internship program. Higher education institutions worldwide adopted the shift from regular face-to-face to virtual internship modalities. However, virtual internship modalities have already been adopted, especially in the Information, Communication, and Technology field in various companies in developed countries, but only sometimes done in developing countries. This study primarily wants to understand the experiences of computing students who underwent a traditional and virtual internship program based on their reflection essays. The qualitative data analysis method, specifically thematic and content analysis, was used to compare students’ experiences in the pre-pandemic and during the pandemic era. This comparison aims to deeply understand the patterns and themes and discover insights from students’ perspectives. The study’s outcome can enhance the computing curriculum and adopt new modalities of the internship program for the university. Automated tools were used to discover the patterns, insights, and themes.

Happiness has been a vague term often described by psychologists, philosophers, and theologians. In connection to academe, the question lies on what factor does the happiness of the students mostly relies on. During the current pandemic, online learning has been widely promoted in replacement to traditional face-to-face classes to maintain youth’s learning at home which arises to different mental health issues affecting their classroom management. This paper proposes an understanding of the nature of happiness in young generation in relation to their classroom engagement with the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas. It uses qualitative study and exploratory method that applied in selected students of different ages and programs in a private university. This also suggest assessments of personal experiences on (1) personal classroom engagement, and (2) self-assessed individual happiness. Data are analyzed through the lenses of Aristotle, whose approach is focused on reasoning, and St. Thomas Aquinas, whose method is based on theology and faith. The results are grouped into different themes concerning the happiness, classroom engagement, and the relationship of the two. It also reveals different concepts of happiness of college students in Aristotle and Aquinas’ view and it was correlated to their classroom engagement on both synchronous and asynchronous online classes. Hence, this paper greatly impacts the purposive and meaningful life of the students, or in general, the society as a whole.

This study frames the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on Philippine micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) from the lens of resilience, while discussing the various types of support that MSMEs have received from government agencies and public and private banks. Using data from a small-sized survey involving managers and workers, it explores the issues, needs, and responses that MSMEs have encountered. Preliminary findings reveal limited stimuli to ensure MSMEs’ survival. To cope with the disruption, most reported adopting adaptive mechanisms. The paper ends with a discussion of policy recommendations and future research directions to further explore and strengthen MSME resilience.

As a crucially-needed adaptation to climate change, the United Nations plans to expand Early Warning Systems (EWS) for extreme weather to cover everyone on Earth. Given the growing interest in this climate change adaptation solution, we assess how well weather early warnings perform for extreme events in different parts of the world. First, we carry out a forecast verification for weather forecasts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for 95th percentile extreme heat and extreme precipitation globally at 0.5° resolution, with three days of lead time. We present the results alongside similar verification results from ECMWF forecasts and a CHIRPS-GEFS forecast, to identify regions of the world with consistent forecast skill. We then overlay the skill of these short-term weather forecasts on top of climate change projections for the increasing frequency of the extreme events themselves. Based on these results, we offer policy implications for EWS investments in different regions. We find that in much of the tropics, weather forecasts have relatively poor skill in forecasting extreme temperature and precipitation events, calling for further investments in predictability. In the extra-tropics, most extreme heat and extreme precipitation events can be correctly forecasted, with better results for multi-day events and shorter lead-times. While there is room to improve predictability, end-to-end investments in EWS in these regions can focus on the use of existing skillful forecasts. Finally, most of the world's land area is projected to see an increase in the magnitude of extreme heat and precipitation events with climate change, and EWS investments in these regions should prepare for unprecedented extremes and changing vulnerabilities. These results provide a foundation for localized research on EWS in different parts of the world as well as evidence for policy and donors on how best to invest in EWS in different regions.

As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, governments and civil society organizations are making large investments in early warning systems (EWS) with the aim to avoid death and destruction from hydro-meteorological events. Early warning systems have four components: (1) risk knowledge, (2) monitoring and warning, (3) warning dissemination and communication, and (4) response capability. While there is room to improve all four of these components, we argue that the largest gaps in early warning systems fall in the latter two categories: warning dissemination/communication and response capability. We illustrate this by examining the four components of early warning systems for the deadliest and costliest meteorological disasters of this century, demonstrating that the lack of EWS protection is not a lack of forecasts or warnings, but rather a lack of adequate communication and lack of response capability. Improving the accuracy of weather forecasts is unlikely to offer major benefits without resolving these gaps in communication and response capability. To protect vulnerable groups around the world, we provide recommendations for investments that would close such gaps, such as improved communication channels, impact forecasts, early action policies and infrastructure. It is our hope that further investment to close these gaps can better deliver on the goal of reducing deaths and damages with EWS.

Educational technology (ET) can reportedly provide innovative resources to improve the language learning process. However, few studies have elaborated on the use of ET for language teacher education and professional development. To shed light on the reported challenges and affordances of digital technology in language teacher education and professional development, the authors conducted a systematic review of recent technology-assisted language teacher education studies. The contributions of the study to the field of technology-assisted language learning (TALL) are twofold. Pedagogically, the study conveys a list of affordances that can inform TALL practitioners about the tested and reported efficacies that can be used in teacher education and professional development programs. Theoretically, the findings inform TALL researchers about the challenges and limitations that need to be overcome to facilitate the use of ET in teacher education and professional development. The findings also help predict the future trend of TALL research on teacher education and professional development based on studies conducted from 2010 to 2021.

Given the recent technological advancements and the critical role that grammar plays in students’ writing development, several digital tools that provide computer-mediated corrective feedback have emerged. One such tool is Grammarly, which identifies duplicate content and errors in grammar, vocabulary, mechanics, and language style. This tech review, therefore, provides an overview of its affordances and how they can be used in English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing. While Grammarly can be a powerful tool that teachers and students can explore in their writing classrooms, it has some limitations that require further enhancements.

The neo-liberal paradigm of competitive governments has been embraced by developing countries avowedly to improve public service. A “Cities and Municipalities Competitiveness Index” (CMCI) has in fact, been in place in the Philippines since 2012 as a measure of competitive government. It annually ranks cities and municipalities in terms of economic dynamism, government efficiency and infrastructure provision. Because of the index’s heavy focus on economic development, this study asks whether competition works for better public service and competitive governments are not remiss in addressing other material dimensions of development, e.g. social, cultural and human development. The study uses mixed methods, e.g. descriptive and qualitative as well as quantitative analysis to review the trends and patterns in the CMCI and infer the Index’s implications in delivering needed public service through a correlation analysis between the CMCI, and human development index (HDI) and poverty incidence (PI). The findings based on limited disaggregated data reveal that competition appears to drive better performance among inherently competitive highly urbanized cities, which are found to have high HDI, low poverty incidence and high internal revenue allotment (IRA) as well. Recognizing some theoretical and practical policy questions on the infirmities of the CI, it also suggests reexamining the reasons for the underperformance of low ‘competitive governments’ or cities, by among others looking at how the IRA may be modified.

Experts generally believe that written corrective feedback (CF) positively affects writing quality and learners’ accurate use of language. However, researchers have not yet identified the most effective type of written CF or sufficiently explored the relation between type of written CF and targeted linguistic category. Thus, this study investigated the effects of metalinguistic explanation and direct correction on Chinese English as a foreign language learners’ correct use of 3 different linguistic categories. The study involved 75 university students who were divided into 3 groups: a metalinguistic explanation group, a direct correction group, and a control group. Using a mixed-methods approach, we found significant differences among the 3 groups and found that direct correction was particularly effective when treating the irregular past tense. However, in a follow-up case study, no evidence indicated the ineffectiveness of either metalinguistic explanation or direct correction for any of the targeted linguistic categories. We discuss implications for future studies.

This one-group pretest-posttest experimental design study presents the effects of mobile games on students' disaster response learning. It also determines which of the usability features of the game might influence learning of students. Ninety-eight students utilized the game for three consecutive days (i.e., the intervention period). Students learn significantly in terms of responding to fire, flood, tsunami, and volcanic eruption but not on storm and earthquake situations. The game did not contribute significantly to the knowledge of the students on storms since students are already attuned to storms. Students did not achieve significant learning gains in earthquake test items because earthquake drills were conducted in local, institutional, and national levels before the study was initiated. Aesthetics was the only usability design factor that can influence learning. Thus, the null hypothesis stating that the usability design factors do not influence students learning was partially rejected. Recommendations were also offered.

Recent developments in the region and in the Philippines have prompted the Philippine government to push for a new basic education curriculum. Along with these changes is the adoption of the new English curriculum known as the Language Arts and Multiliteracies Curriculum (LAMC). This article, therefore, sought to examine the K-12 English Curriculum in the Philippines from a 21st century learning perspective. The first section of this article briefly describes the LAMC and 21st century learning in both general and English language teaching-related terms. The discussion then reviews the specificity and coherence of the LAMC, how it is consistent with the principles espoused by 21st century learning, and how it is aligned to established language teaching and learning principles. The findings revealed that the current curriculum needs to improve its specificity, internal coherence, and integration of some essential principles of 21st century learning and language teaching and learning. The article concludes with the possible challenges in implementing the curriculum, suggestions for future design and implementation, and implications for future studies.