This paper develops and compares two theories of strategic behavior of professional forecasters. The first theory posits that forecasters compete in a forecasting contest with pre-specified rules. In equilibrium of a winner-take-all contest, forecasts are excessively differentiated. According to the alternative reputational cheap talk theory, forecasters aim at convincing the market that they are well informed. The market evaluates their forecasting talent on the basis of the forecasts and the realized state. If the market expects forecaster honesty, forecasts are shaded toward the prior mean. With correct market expectations, equilibrium forecasts are imprecise but not shaded.

Digital game-based learning is a hot topic of research and development. Since the advent of computer and video games, educators were inherently interested in utilizing the beneficial aspects of computer games for educational purposes. These factors are primarily the intrinsic motivation of games, immersive environments, engaging stories, and an artful balance between challenges and continuously growing abilities. Proponents of computer games delivered a large number of empirical investigations revealing that games may foster the development of abilities and competencies. Besides the advantageous aspects of computer games, a variety of problems were reported by researchers. Due to the high costs of professional game development, many educational games are technologically poor and cannot compete with entertainment games in terms of visual design, possibilities for interactions, or storytelling. Moreover, many current educational games do not incorporate a sound psychological, pedagogical, or didactic background; instead they are focusing on transmission or rehearsal of isolated facts or skills. Finally, such games lack the ability to adapt to individual competencies failing to balance challenge and abilities regarding knowledge or skills. The ELEKTRA project, introduced in this article, aims for addressing these problems relying on an interdisciplinary approach of cognitive science, neuroscience, pedagogy, game design, and game development. The project will develop an adventure game that can keep up with commercial games and that focuses on primarily curriculum-related educational purposes by incorporating a sound psychological and pedagogical framework. Moreover, the project will prove the outcomes of research and development by a comprehensive game demonstrator.

We present several classroom demonstrations that have sparked student involvement in our introductory undergraduate courses in probability and statistics. The demonstrations involve both experimentation using exams and statistical analysis and adjustment of exam scores. Keywords: calibration, correlation, instruction, prediction, regression. 1 Introduction Our courses for undergraduates typically include two midterm exams and a final. Students are of course very interested in their exam scores; here, we present some tricks we have used to channel this interest into thinking about statistics. 2 Guessing exam scores We include a question at the end of the first midterm asking the student to guess his or her total score on the other questions of the exam. As an incentive, the student receives five points extra credit if the guess is within ten points of the actual score (which is on a scale of 0--125). When the students complete their exams, we keep track of the order in which they are ha...