John Casey

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Lecturer at Unitec Institute of Technology

Abstract Gamification is the application of game mechanisms in non-gaming environments with the objective of enhancing user experience. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of gamification in educational context, i.e. teaching numeracy at a primary school level. We study the appealing characteristics of engaging computer games from child...

Traditionally, diabetes education has relied on written materials, with limited resources available for children with diabetes. Mobile games can be effective and motivating tools for the promotion of children's health. In our earlier work, we proposed a novel approach for designing computer games aimed at educating children with diabetes. In this a...

There are a growing number of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Research has shown that these children process information quite differently from others. A lot of ADHD-diagnosed children (especially inattentive type ADHD) are more of a visual learner, easily distracted, struggle to follow instructions, are easily forget...

The use of computer games as common vehicles for education, as opposed to pure entertainment, has gained immense popularity in recent years. In our earlier work, we investigated the appealing characteristics of engaging computer games for children and designed an educational tool based on those characteristics. In this paper, we present the results...

The use of computer games as common vehicles for education, as opposed to pure entertainment, has gained immense popularity in recent years. In our earlier work, we investigated the appealing characteristics of engaging computer games for children and designed an educational tool based on those characteristics. In this paper, we present the results...

The success rate of computer games in engaging children has prompted educational researchers to investigate if similar techniques can be used to engage children with learning. In this paper, we present the results of a study conducted with 120 primary school children, in which two versions of our proposed educational tool (Features Enriched Game (F...

The use of computer games as common vehicles for education, as opposed to pure entertainment, has gained immense popularity in recent years. In this paper, we investigate the appealing characteristics of engaging computer games for children, and whether embedding these characteristics into an educational tool enhances children’s learning. We presen...

Previous research has shown that children with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have unique difficulties that can make more traditional methods of teaching less effective. In this paper, we present a novel approach for designing computer games aimed at offering a more dynamic way of teaching ADD/A...

Load balance is a critical issue in distributed systems, such as server grids. In this paper, we propose a Balanced Load Queue (BLQ) model, which combines the queuing theory and hydro-dynamic theory, to model load balance in server grids. Base on the BLQ model, we claim that if the system is in the state of global fairness, then the performance of...

Traditionally, emulation systems have been unnecessarily written and compiled for specific computer architectures. Therefore, emulations cannot easily be ported to other computing platforms. This paper proposes a portable emulation system, where the dependencies on particular host architectures are minimised by developing the emulation runtime, in...