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What if the moon didn't exist : voyages to earths that might have been
... This would cause fierce winds on the surface of Earth. To withstand such winds, trees would need to be shorter, wider, and stronger (Comins 1993). An example of an observation of this type is shown in Figure 1. ...
This paper introduces a novel approach for learning natural language descriptions of scenery in Minecraft. We apply techniques from Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing to create an AI framework called MineObserver for assessing the accuracy of learner-generated descriptions of science-related images. The ultimate purpose of the system is to automatically assess the accuracy of learner observations, written in natural language, made during science learning activities that take place in Minecraft. Eventually, MineObserver will be used as part of a pedagogical agent framework for providing in-game support for learning. Preliminary results are mixed, but promising with approximately 62% of images in our test set being properly classified by our image captioning approach. Broadly, our work suggests that computer vision techniques work as expected in Minecraft and can serve as a basis for assessing learner observations.
... Learning activities include technical tutorials, lecture, discussion, guided explorations within the game and free time to work on individual or group projects; no grades were assigned for these activities. We referred to hypothetical scenarios of Earth speculated by astrophysicist Dr. Neil Comins [31,32], a co-PI on this project. Participants were asked to take a survey on interest in MC and STEM interest on the first and last day of camp. ...
Diversity has been a prevalent issue in the American STEM workforce for a number of years. Efforts to increase diversification have resulted in alternate learning spaces such as makerspaces, after school programs, and technology integrated curriculums. Our study, hosted at a non-profit organization serving underrepresented youth, leveraged the video game Minecraft (MC) as a way to engage summer campers in scientific concepts and inquiries over one week. Reoccurring themes from interviews include familial rules on technology use at home, engaging with STEM in a novel way, and a love for building and creating within MC. We discuss our insight into the discoveries and challenges of these types of STEM-oriented program that takes place in informal settings. CCS CONCEPTS • Social and professional topics~Informal education • Social and professional topics~Race and ethnicity • Social and professional topics~Adolescents • Applied computing~Interactive learning environments • General and reference~Experimentation
... Known as "What-if? Scenarios (Comins, 1993), our approach involves using Minecraft to allow learners to explore and explain the science behind observed differences. For example, if they are on a map modeling earth with no Moon, they may see different terrain than usual, creatures, plants, and more. ...
1. Minecraft: Popular and relevant for education With over 110M players, 241M logins per month, and 2B+ hours played on Xbox alone 1 , in 2016 the video game Minecraft ascended to be the second most popular game in history, passing Grand Theft Auto V but still well behind Tetris (Peckham, 2016). One way to think about its reach and appeal is that millions of children worldwide decide on a daily basis to interact deeply and meaningfully with a game that is essentially a simulation of the natural world. We believe it is likely that this vast amount of time spent playing Minecraft is influencing the way children think about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), and are engaged in a research project that explores this question. Because of its flexibility, appeal, and inherent connections to STEM learning, Minecraft has seen a dramatic rise in its adoption by educators worldwide who are using it as a platform for student projects, sharing, and learning (Schifter & Cipollone, 2013; Schwartz, 2015). Interactions in Minecraft involve a broad range of educationally relevant content (Lane & Yi, 2017): Exploring and investigating different biomes and climates that match those on Earth, including deserts, forests, jungles, taigas, and many others. Navigating in and around different types of terrain, such as hills, mountains, caverns, caves, oceans, and more. Interacting with a wide variety of wildlife and agricultural content, including animals, fish, birds, wheat, grass, fruits, vegetables, and a long list of fictional content. Searching for, mining, collecting, and combining many different resources such as different kinds of wood, stone, metal, dirt, and more. Building electrical circuits, switches, complex machines, and automated farms. Players have even reconstructed world wonders, many of which can be found online (e.g. YouTube, dedicated servers). For example, the Taj Mahal is a popular project, as are fictional places, such as Westeros from the Game of Thrones. To achieve such feats of engineering, players often work collaboratively by planning and coordinating their tasks. They assume roles (e.g., mining for resources, planning a base/fort, crafting tools and weapons, etc.), work iteratively to refine their creations, and of course, share their work with friends, family, and the online community. Thus, not only is there a need to better understand how Minecraft may frame STEM learning generally, there is also a need to provide research-based support for its use in specific contexts and educational settings. 2. Top level categories of Minecraft activities Soon after its release in 2009, educational uses of Minecraft quickly appeared online via teacher blogs, YouTube videos, and in educational technology news sites. Arguments for its appeal for STEM learning were often intuitive and compelling (Short, 2012), and its rapid adoption ultimately lead to Microsoft's release of Minecraft: Education Edition, a version of the game that comes prepackaged with tools specifically for teachers and classroom uses. 2 However, despite the success and rapid rise of Minecraft as a learning environment, very little effort has gone into formalizing its various connections to STEM. If the game continues to be popular in educational settings and we are to work towards evidence-based practices, it will be important to provide a substrate for the activities learners perform while playing. The goal of our taxonomy is to act as one possible foundation for more rigor in examining Minecraft. We seek a thorough, although certainly not comprehensive, overview of everything you can do in Minecraft.
... The easy material (mean word length 4.1 letters) was taken from a work of juvenile ®ction (Sachar, 1987) written for a 10-to 12-year-old audience. The dicult material (mean word length 5.0 letters) was from a popular science book on astronomy (Comins, 1993 ) aimed at the educated adult lay person. The text was prepared as follows. ...
Research on time and attention shows that a nontemporal task may interfere with a concurrent timing task by making time judgments shorter, more variable, and/or more inaccurate compared to timing-only conditions. Brown (1998, Psychological Research, 61, 71-81) counteracted the interference effect by giving subjects automaticity training on a nontemporal task to reduce the amount of processing resources the task required. Such practice attenuated interference in timing. Two new experiments were designed to replicate and extend the previous findings. Subjects generated a series of 5-s temporal productions under single-task (timing only) and dual-task (timing plus nontemporal task) conditions. The nontemporal tasks were pursuit rotor tracking (Experiment 1), and mirror-reversed reading (Experiment 2). We employed a pretest-practice-posttest paradigm, with the practice sessions devoted to performance of the nontemporal task. Pretest-posttest comparisons showed that practice reduced interference in timing in both experiments. Dual-task probe trials were given during the practice sessions to trace the time course of the improvement in timing. The results showed that interference in timing was reduced with even small amounts of practice. The findings support the idea that timing is very sensitive to changes in the allocation of attentional resources.
This chapter discusses factors necessary for life originating and developing on a planet somewhere else in the universe than on Earth. Of course, I am not the first to do this: ever since people became interested in the origin of life, ideas have been put forward, though generally only a few, often independent, factors are taken into account. By considering several interdependent, interacting factors, together constituting a system, I view life as a compartment of its surroundings. The composition both of the system and of its surroundings changes over geological time: they should not be thought to be static. In this, the generation, maintenance, and acceleration of an energy flow are central. This flow from the environment into and then through the living system determines its chemical composition and interactions, as well as its evolving biochemical structure and dynamic. It is an organized flow and as such is separated from its surroundings, becoming a system operating increasingly independently. From this perspective, I give arguments about the likelihood of extraterrestrial life originating – and even evolving – on another, possibly habitable planet comparable with Earth.
The Drake equation is used for calculating the probability of life occurring on another planet elsewhere in the universe, even of intelligent life forms with which we might be able to communicate. The parameters used in this equation are mainly astronomical, omitting the biological parameters necessary for estimating the probability of life developing extraterrestrially. Extraterrestrial life depends on a multitude of factors interacting, both in the right combination and in the right sequence, interactions changing over evolutionary time. The chance of occurrence of the right combinations over billions of years is immensely small, too small to be realized in practice. A certain degree of interdependency between these factors would increase this chance, but not enough to make it approach the chance of occurrence of a habitable planet. It seems that our search for extraterrestrial life is in vain.
We are using our planet as the reference point for interpreting future observations of terrestrial exoplanets. However, our
guide may turn out to be wrong if for some reason the Earth and its environment are exceptional. To gain some insight on this
fundamental problem, in this last chapter we will discuss three basic questions for which we do not yet have complete answers:
Is our Sun special? How common are the planetary systems such as our own? And finally, Is the Earth something unique?
In addition to the accepted roles of plate tectonics in regulating planetary habitability through the composition of the atmosphere and temperature, and creating continents to enhance land-based evolution and biodiversity, it has a hitherto unexplored role in influencing surface mineralogy with possible implications for early evolution. Plate tectonics creates continents through the accretion of buoyant granitic crust. Erosion of the granites yields specific minerals including quartz, radioactive (uranium-, thorium-bearing) phases and phosphates, which could play a role in early evolution. Radioactive grains could help to concentrate carbon and increase its complexity through irradiation-induced polymerization at the prebiotic stage, and possibly influence mutation rates once life was established. Weathering of phosphate minerals was an important source of phosphorus for the biochemistry that is essential to life. Quartz-rich sands provide a translucent refuge for early photosynthesizers below the harmful effects of ultra-violet irradiation at the surface. Uranium is also important to the development of nuclear power in an advanced civilization. The mineralogy that engenders these processes is distinct from that to be expected on a planet without plate tectonics, where volcanogenic sediments would predominate, and further emphasizes the importance of plate tectonics to the evolution of life.
Many philosophers have believed that the laws of nature differ from the accidental truths in their invariance under counterfactual perturbations. Roughly speaking, the laws would still have held had q been the case, for any q that is consistent with the laws. (Trivially, no accident would still have held under every such counterfactual supposition.) The main problem with this slogan (even if it is true) is that it uses the laws themselves to delimit qs range. I present a means of distinguishing the laws (and their logical consequences) from the accidents, in terms of their range of invariance under counterfactual antecedents, that does not appeal to physical modalities (or any cognate notion) in delimiting the relevant range of counterfactual perturbations. I then argue that this approach explicates the sense in which the laws possess a kind of necessity.
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