Interactive immersive entertainment, or videogame playing, has emerged as a major entertainment and educational medium. As research and development initiatives proliferate, educational researchers might benefit by developing more grounded theories about them. This article argues for framing game play as a designed experience. Players ’ understandings are developed through cycles of performance within the gameworlds, which instantiate particular theories of the world (ideological worlds). Players develop new identities both through game play and through the gaming communities in which these identities are enacted. Thus research that examines game-based learning needs to account for both kinds of interactions within the gameworld and in broader social contexts. Examples from curriculum developed for Civilization III and Supercharged! show how games can communicate powerful ideas and open new identity trajectories for learners.

Despite its current popularity, “emergence” is a concept with a venerable history and an elusive, ambiguous standing in contemporary evolutionary theory. This paper briefly recounts the history of the term and details some of its current usages. Not only are there radically varying interpretations about what emergence means but “reductionist ” and “holistic ” theorists have very different views about the issue of causation. However, these two seemingly polar positions are not irreconcilable. Reductionism, or detailed analysis of the parts and their interactions, is essential for answering the “how ” question in evolution--how does a complex living system work? But holism is equally necessary for answering the “why ” question-- why did a particular arrangement of parts evolve? In order to answer the “why ” question, a broader, multi-leveled paradigm is required. The reductionist approach to explaining emergent complexity has entailed a search for underlying “laws of emergence.” Another alternative is the “Synergism Hypothesis, ” which focuses on the “economics ” – the functional effects produced by emergent wholes and their selective consequences. This theory, in a nutshell, proposes that the synergistic (co-operative) effects produced by various combinations of parts have played a major causal role in the evolution of biological complexity. It will also be argued that emergent phenomena represent, in effect, a subset of a much larger universe of combined effects in the natural world; there are many different kinds of synergy, but not all synergies represent emergent phenomena.

Space syntax derives from a set of analytic measures of configuration that have been shown to correlate well with how people move through and use buildings and urban environments. Space syntax represents the open space of an environment in terms of the intervisibility of points in space. The measures are thus purely configurational, and take no account of attractors, nor do they make any assumptions about origins and destinations or path planning. Space syntax has found that, despite many proposed higher-level cognitive models, there appears to be a fundamental process that informs human and social usage of an environment. In this paper we describe an exosomatic visual architecture, based on space syntax visibility graphs, giving many agents simultaneous access to the same pre-processed information about the configuration of a space layout. Results of experiments in a simulated retail environment show that a surprisingly simple ‘random next step ’ based rule outperforms a more complex ‘destination based’ rule in reproducing observed human movement behaviour. We conclude that the effects of spatial configuration on movement patterns that space syntax studies have found are consistent with a model of individual decision behaviour based on the spatial affordances offered by the morphology of the local visual field. 1.

We present and evaluate an agent-based model (ABM) of land use change at the rural-urban fringe. This paper is part of a project that links the ABM to surveys of residential preferences and historical patterns of development. Validation is an important issue for such models and we discuss the use of distributional phenomena as a method of validation. We then highlight the ability of our ABM to generate two phenomena evident in empirical analysis of urban development patterns: a power law relationship between frequency and cluster size and a negative exponential relationship between density and distance from city center. We discuss these results in the light of validation of ABMs.

ABSTRACT. This paper suggests that from a cognitive-evolutionary perspective, computational media are qualitatively different from many of the technologies that have promised educational change in the past and failed to deliver. Recent theories of human cognitive evolution suggest that human cognition has evolved through four distinct stages: episodic, mimetic, mythic, and theoretical. This progression was driven by three cognitive advances: the ability to “represent ” events, the development of symbolic reference, and the creation of external symbolic representations. In this paper, we suggest that we are developing a new cognitive culture: a “virtual ” culture dependent on the externalization of symbolic processing. We suggest here that the ability to externalize the manipulation of formal systems changes the very nature of cognitive activity. These changes will have important consequences for mathematics education in coming decades. In particular, we argue that mathematics education in a virtual culture should strive to give students generative fluency to learn varieties of representational systems, provide opportunities to create and modify representational forms, develop skill in making and exploring virtual environments, and emphasize mathematics as a fundamental way of making sense of the world, reserving most exact computation and formal proof for those who will need those specialized skills.

Advancements in handheld computing, particularly their portability, social interactivity, context sensitivity, connectivity, and individuality open new opportunities immersive learning environments. This paper articulates the pedagogical potential of augmented reality simulations in environmental engineering education by immersing students in the roles of scientists conducting investigations. This design experiment examines if augmented reality simulation games can be used to help students understand science as a social practice, whereby inquiry is a process of balancing and managing resources, combining multiple data sources, and forming and revising hypotheses in situ. We provide four case studies of secondary environmental science students participating in the program. Positioning students in virtual investigations made apparent their beliefs about science, and confronted simplistic beliefs about the nature of science. Playing the game in “real” space also triggered students’ pre-existing knowledge, suggesting that a powerful potential of augmented reality simulation games could be in their ability to connect academic content and practices with their physical lived worlds. The game structure provided students a narrative to think with, although students differed in their ability to create a coherent narrative of events. We argue that Environmental Detectives is one model for helping students understand the socially situated nature of scientific practice.

The formal and empirical-generative perspectives of computation are demonstrated to be inadequate to secure the goals of simulation in the social sciences. Simulation does not resemble formal demonstrations or generative mechanisms that deductively explain how certain models are sufficient to generate emergent macrostructures of interest. The description of scientific practice implies additional epistemic conceptions of scientific knowledge. Three kinds of knowledge that account for a comprehensive description of the discipline were identified: formal, empirical and intentional knowledge. The use of formal conceptions of computation for describing simulation is refuted; the roles of programming languages according to intentional accounts of computation are identified; and the roles of iconographic programming languages and aesthetic machines in simulation are characterized. The roles that simulation and intentional decision making may be able to play in a participative information society are also discussed. 1.

urban-theoretical CA models, on the other hand, are used to examine the role that complexity has in driving dynamics in urban phenomena, such as fringe growth, redevelopment, suburban sprawl, edge city formation, polycentricity, agglomeration, inertia, diffusion, spatial structure, and social segregation. Essentially, abstract urban-theoretical CA models are used as laboratories for testing ideas and theories about the city (as opposed to complexity). Operational urban CA are used as planning support systems (although very few are actually operational) to assist planners, policymakers, and the public in managing and building cities. Generally, these serve as scenario-generating tools that form the basis of discussion. Operational urban models have increasingly turned to rule-based formulations based on logit models and decision theory (De la Barra 1989; Torrens 2000b). Also, in transport modeling, 48 activity-based simulations have been gaining ground (Ben-Akiva and Bowman 1998), and micro simulation with operational models has long been underway (Wegener 1996). It does not take a quantum leap to fuse those approaches with CA, which essentially add a dynamic and spatial spin to these existing techniques (Torrens 2000a, 2001). Indeed, following the development of the TRANSIMS model at Los Alamos National Laboratories (Nagel, Beckman and Barrett 1999), there has been a concerted drive to push metropolitan planning organizations into incorporating CA into operational forecasting models, with the implication that those models be used in the assessment of clean air legislation compliance (Travel Model Improvement Program 1999).

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this article, wewould liketo#rst summarize a few major insights revealed in those two articles and then provide a roadmap for readers to initialize their own trails.