RESUMEN
Video games and immersive, narrative experiences are often called upon to help students understand difficult scientific concepts, such as sense of scale. However, the development of educational video games requires expertise and, frequently, a sizable budget. Here, we report on the use of an interactive text-style video game, NanoAdventure, to communicate about sense of scale and nanotechnology to the public. NanoAdventure was developed on an open-source, free-to-use platform with simple coding and enhanced with free or low-cost assets. NanoAdventure was launched in three languages (English, Spanish, Chinese) and compared to textbook-style and blog-style control texts in a randomized study. Participants answered questions on their knowledge of nanotechnology and their attitudes toward nanotechnology before and after reading one randomly assigned text (textbook, blog, or NanoAdventure game). Our results demonstrate that interactive fiction is effective in communicating about sense of scale and nanotechnology as well as the relevance of nanotechnology to a general public. NanoAdventure was found to be the most "fun" and easy to read of all text styles by participants in a randomized trial. Here, we make the case for interactive "Choose Your Own Adventure" style games as another effective tool among educational game models for chemistry and science communication.
RESUMEN
BACKGROUND: Psycholinguistic models of language production provide a framework for determining the locus of language breakdown that leads to speech-sound disorder (SSD) in children. AIMS: To examine whether children with SSD differ from their age-matched peers with typical speech and language development (TD) in the ability phonologically to encode lexical items that have been accessed from memory. METHODS & PROCEDURES: Thirty-six children (18 with TD, 18 with SSD) viewed pictures while listening to interfering words (IW) or a non-linguistic auditory stimulus presented over headphones either 150 ms before, concurrent with or 150 ms after picture presentation. The phonological similarity of the IW and the pictures' names varied. Picture-naming latency, accuracy and duration were tallied. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: All children named pictures more quickly in the presence of an IW identical to the picture's name than in the other conditions. At the +150 ms stimulus onset asynchrony, pictures were named more quickly when the IW shared phonemes with the picture's name than when they were phonologically unrelated to the picture's name. The size of this effect was similar for children with SSD and children with TD. Variation in the magnitude of inhibition and facilitation on cross-modal priming tasks across children was more strongly affected by the size of the expressive and receptive lexicons than by speech-production accuracy. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: Results suggest that SSD is not associated with reduced phonological encoding ability, at least as it is reflected by cross-modal naming tasks.