Academic Development & Support

One can liken the African proverb "it takes a village to raise a child" to the contemporary tertiary education experience of young adults in South Africa (SA); as it demonstrates the sizeable monetary, human capital, and supplemental support efforts it takes to ensure a student successfully obtains a degree after years of study. Lecturers in the School of Computer Science and Information Systems (CS&IS) at the NorthWest University (NWU), Vaal campus are employing a practical approach to elevate and underscore student perspectives/approaches on both non-technical and technical subject matter. This is done by giving learners the opportunity to iterate on an existing serious game concept which emphasises pedagogical content knowledge. Sharpened focus on effective communication and non-technical skills of students will allow them to more easily integrate, understand and convey work in a knowledge-worker context. The researchers sought to discover how the students registered for the communication skills module experienced a new approach to CS&IS teaching and learning at NWU, Vaal.

The following design paper reports on a serious game project being made by interdisciplinary researchers at the NorthWest University (NWU), Vanderbijlpark Campus. The aim of this venture is to develop a trading card game based on specific History content, using similar mechanics found in popular card games such as Magic: The Gathering and the Pokémon Trading Card Game. The game is called Dogs of War (DoW) and the historical figures will be depicted as various dog breeds to subvert player expectations and assuage a grim period of human History. The game itself is designed in such a way that up to six people can play together, with each player representing a faction that was involved in the war. These factions include: Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, Great Britain, United States of America and Soviet Russia. The conceptualisation of DoW has already reached the initial play-testing phase, wherein the basic mechanics and units already having been designed. The game will be implemented in a third year History class at NWU in 2020, with the aim of researching whether the game itself can enhance self-directed learning through tangential and exciting gameplay. Focus group interviews will be held at the end of the first semester (2020) to gauge this prototype's overall effectiveness.

Professional bodies regulating training for accountancy students posit that graduates lack certain professional competencies and skills in the workplace and it is evinced that there is a gap between the classroom and the boardroom. The South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA) call on lecturers to aid with the development of professional competencies and 21 st century skills. Obtainment of these professional competencies and 21 st century skills will prepare students to meet the challenges and opportunities of today's business world. A growing body of literature on teaching and learning indicates that lecturers should amend their teaching practices and pedagogical framework to include teaching and learning of competencies and skills. Teaching and learning research across disciplines suggests that the use of games in the classrooms can help students obtain these competencies and skills. A serious game dubbed Liike has been developed for undergraduate accountancy students to not only address the professional competencies and 21 st century skills they require in the workplace but also to afford students an opportunity to apply theoretical concepts learned across different modules. This paper presents the detail of the design and development process of Liike. Furthermore, the paper highlights the Liike design-oriented research goal and methodology. Ultimately, the key characteristics that informed the design of Liike are presented as lessons learned. In conclusion it is suggested that not all design elements are created equally when it comes to imparting professional competencies and 21 st century skills. Incorporating specific game design approaches and drivers are also needed to tie-up with the required professional competencies and 21 st century skills.

This paper presents the results of a heuristic evaluation to appraise the design components and the first development interface of a first year mobile Statistics serious game-Vuvu's Statventure. Through the heuristic evaluation the researchers wanted to ensure that the preferred game attributes are present and accounted for in the first Episode of the mobile serious game for statistics. This enabled the researchers to: (i) assess whether the conceptual features of the educational game pose potential problems to prospective first year student users, and (ii) to incorporate participants' contributions into game design realities. Three game attributes formed part of the heuristic evaluation: (i) character-based inquiry; (ii) gameplay-related inquiry; and (iii) user-interface design. The results indicated that the students were satisfied with the elements conceptualised for the game and contributed greatly in terms of gameplay and character enquiry. Key Words Mobile Serious Games, Design research, Development life cycle CCS Concepts: HCI design and evaluation methods, Heuristic evaluations and Participatory design General Terms: Serious Games ACM Reference format: 2017. A heuristic evaluation of the design and development of a statistics serious game.

The purpose of this conceptual study is to analyse the political economy of Zimbabwe’s development aid trajectory from 1980 to 2013. The discussion unfolds around four historical epochs: colonial legacy, land and independence from 1980 to 1990; the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) 1991–2000; The Multi-Party Democracy period 2001–2008 and the Government of National Unity (GNU) 2008–2013. In doing so, the discourse offers a critical discussion of the factors that have characterised the flow of aid to Zimbabwe. It also explores the historical, socio-economic and political events that shaped development policies and outcomes in Zimbabwe from 1980 to 2013. The study also explores the scale, interaction and impact of aid flow to Zimbabwe. This study is purely qualitative and uses documentary reviews as part of the literature review to extrapolate the relevant data. In this study, we argue that the flow of aid is politically motivated. The study recommends that the Zimbabwea...

The article considers how elderly people use different types of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and studies their readiness to use ICT in everyday life, based on the data obtained in a sociological survey. We made a hypothesis that age has an effect on older people's attitudes towards ICT. In this article ICT will include the Internet, mobile devices and on-line banking. We discovered the types of ICT which will be used by older people in their everyday lives. We stipulated four areas of the use of ICT in older people's lives such as financial, administrative, accessible and entertainment. During our research we concluded that respondents aged 55 to 64 are more active in using IT and demonstrate their interest in different spheres of everyday life. We also concluded that there were no differences in the results between genders. Overall, the sociological survey has indicated that more than 42% of respondents have the skills to use modern Information Technologies. It has been noted that over the past years the government has been encouraging older people to use ICT in their lives. The government in the Tomsk region is also working to achieve this.

The South African History Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) emphasises the significance of History being that of empowering learners with historical skills and knowledge but there are critical gaps that this article tries to posit that affects quality teaching. The current global atmosphere of democracy with its emphasis on decolonisation, demands curriculum transformation. Such a context calls on ways of bridging the divide between theory and practice in education. CAPS-History emphasise the importance of teaching historical concepts but excludes the critical concept of Historical Significance which safeguards skills of interpretation and understanding why certain histories are in the official arena and others not. This article argues the CAPS-History curriculum has to be transformed to reflect the ideological changes that is experienced globally. The article uses critical discourse analysis in an attempt to uplift historical knowledge of Africans and to un-silence historically significant narratives. Data for the article was drawn from the observation of the author's teaching experiences by using auto-ethnographical methods. The findings of the article are that CAPS-History have carried the implicit message that Historical Significance should be attributed to white males in power and selected events in history of people in positions of power and themes like symbols and symbolism, which are key in indigenous knowledge, are silenced. The conclusion of this article is that CAPS requires an epistemology that supports democratic principles of equality which calls upon unsilencing of certain historical narratives by employing Historical Significance as one of the critical concepts thinking concepts

No reproduction, copy or transmission may be made without written permission from the individual authors. Review Process Papers submitted to this conference have been double-blind peer reviewed before final acceptance to the conference. Initially, abstracts were reviewed for relevance and accessibility and successful authors were invited to submit full papers. Many thanks to the reviewers who helped ensure the quality of all the submissions. Ethics and Publication Malpractice Policy ACPIL adheres to a strict ethics and publication malpractice policy for all publicationsdetails of which can be found here: http://www.academic-conferences.org/policies/ethics-policy-for-publishing-in-theconference-proceedings-of-academic-conferences-and-publishing-international-limited/ Conference Proceedings The Conference Proceedings is a book published with an ISBN and ISSN. The proceedings have been submitted to a number of accreditation, citation and indexing bodies including Thomson ISI Web of Science and Elsevier Scopus. Author affiliation details in these proceedings have been reproduced as supplied by the authors themselves.

A serious tabletop game called “Gr8 Success!” has been developed for an undergraduate Communication skills module at the North-West University (NWU) in South Africa. This paper presents the details of the development process and discusses the first play tested prototype of the serious game in question. The game is described in the context of a conceptual framework being developed by researchers at the Serious Game Institute of South Africa (SGI-SA).

Game-based learning (GBL) is said to have encouraging potential for varying educational contexts and scenarios, but how do practitioners select suitable edifying gaming content for their own unique environments? Moreover, what are the correct strategies, recommendations, procedures and/or parameters for choosing appropriate gaming media for learning? There are countless options to choose from, varying in genre, play style, medium, difficulty, aim(s), etc. This paper presents the results of an interpretive study seeking to discern a set of requirements and qualities of informed GBL selection. Online surveys completed by history-for-education students at a South African Higher Education institution hope to bring us closer to guidelines for more effective GBL selection and application in tertiary education contexts across the globe. The following paper begins with remarks on the significance of self-direction in contemporary Higher Education and the potential for GBL to not only spur t...

Contemporary serious game development remains largely improvised and haphazard. Many hindering aspects are to blame for this, including: project scope, available resources, stakeholder makeup, subject expert consultation(s), etc. Most significantly for this paper, however, game designers typically struggle to imbue philosophical depth into their projects. The popular trading card game "Magic: The Gathering" (Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro) offers remedies to this issue in the form of a central nucleus: the colour pie. The purpose of this research was to investigate the merits of the game design of MTG and to adapt it for our own use in a new card game. A similar framework has been devised for a history-for-education trading card game currently in development called "Dogs of War" (DoW). The research has up until this point only focused on designing DoW, but once the game is complete, a research project will be conducted to study its efficacy. This research reports on the extent to which tangible results (mechanically, and otherwise) can be accrued by formulating and implementing such a philosophical design foundation. Results include giving examples of Dogs of War and how it was adapted from MTG.

The case study approach, focusing on Mahikeng Local Municipality, is essential for capturing localised nuances and providing actionable insights to policymakers, researchers and community leaders seeking to mitigate the negative effects of lockdowns on rural populations.