Inhibiting Cracks in Latte Droplets.

Latte is a mixture of coffee and milk and a model of complex fluids containing biomolecules, usually leaving complex deposit patterns after droplet evaporation. Despite the universality and applicability of biofluids, their evaporation and deposition dynamics are not fully understood and controllable because of the complexity of their components. Here we investigate latte droplet evaporation and deposition dynamics, primarily the crack development and inhibition in droplet deposit patterns. With regard to a mixture of milk and coffee, we find that the surfactant-like nature of milk and intermolecular interactions between coffee particles and milk bioparticles are responsible for achieving uniform crack-free deposits. This finding improves our understanding of pattern formation from evaporating droplets with complex biofluids, offering a clue to applications of bioinks with both printability and biocompatibility.

Students' perception on immersive learning through 2D and 3D metaverse platforms.

The main purpose of this paper is to add empirical data to the nascent field of metaverse learning and teaching by examining factors affecting student participation and their perceived experiences of different metaverse platforms. For data collection, 57 Korean undergraduates participated in a self-administered questionnaire and a short reflective essay regarding their experiences on three metaverse platforms (ifland, Gather Town, & Frame VR). For data analysis, exploratory factor analysis was first executed to derive the underlying factors that can explain student participation in metaverse platforms. The social and interactive learning as well as individualized and behavioral learning were identified as two main contributing factors. While the three platforms had no statistical difference in terms of social presence, students' sentimentally perceived differences among them. The sentiment analysis shows that 60.00% of ifland users were positive, followed by 53.66% of Frame VR users and 51.22% of Gather Town users. Furthermore, the additional keyword analysis shows why students expressed the perceived experiences of each platform in a different way. Given that the success of metaverse instruction can be dependent upon whether students regard it as beneficial, such measurements of student perception on the effectiveness of learning on metaverse platforms can offer meaningful recommendations for tech-savvy educators.

"Should I change myself or not?": Examining (Re)constructed language teacher identity during the COVID-19 pandemic through text-mining.

On the basis of interviews with 20 Chinese EFL teachers and text-mining analysis, this study investigates the reconstruction of language teacher identity during the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of context, agency, and practice. The word co-occurrence analysis and collocation statistics with modal verbs coded by KH Coder 3.0 demonstrate that English teachers face two types of identity reconstruction processes: (a) situational context related to various changes, and, (b) interactional context that causes communication difficulties with students. How teachers enact agency is influenced by their teaching experience. Through practice, teachers reconstruct their identity as solution seekers, positive learners, and confident professionals.

Promoting engineering students' social responsibility and willingness to act on socioscientific issues.

Background: Despite increasing awareness of the importance of promoting the social responsibility of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals, few intervention programs have been developed to enhance the social responsibility of college students or adults in the STEM fields. In this paper, we introduced a new instructional program, called ENACT (engage, navigate, anticipate, conduct, and take action) and examined whether the program increased the social responsibility among safety engineering students (N = 46) recruited from a university located in a southern metropolitan area of South Korea. Results: In the ENACT program, the college students selected and explored socioscientific issues (SSIs) of their own interest then autonomously engaged in scientific and engineering group projects spanning a semester where they developed solutions to the SSIs and shared them with their communities. At the conclusion of the intervention in this study, they displayed an increased social responsibility regarding the consideration of societal needs and demands, civic engagement and services, and participation in policy decision-making. Social responsibility scores measured after the intervention (post-test) correlated with students' willingness to voluntarily participate in projects involving SSIs. In addition, the intervention effects were more pronounced for the students who initially had medium and low social responsibility scores. Conclusions: We have shown that social responsibility can be nurtured by systemic instructional approaches, and increased social responsibility can lead to greater commitment to resolving SSIs. Mastering engineering content knowledge and skills is the key element of engineering curricula. However, we are compelled to incorporate social responsibility into the STEM curriculum. We believe that the ENACT model contributes toward this end.