Bergen Science Center

Increased focus on out-of-school learning has led to extended use of Science Centers as learning arenas for junior and high school students in formal learning situations. The creation of learning trails, semantic collections of science center exhibits based on formal learning plans for interdisciplinary STEAM education, has become an area of focus. Previous design research has resulted in the definition of story-driven learning trails that foster flow and engagement in learners. In science centers, equal emphasis is placed on the physical real-world domain, represented by the exhibits themselves, as the virtual components, represented as collaborative positions-based portables carried between exhibits, linking the exhibits into virtual storylines using sensors and control assignments. This defines science center learning trails as mixed reality systems; holistic systems that integrate real and virtual elements, existing on the axis between real and virtual poles on the reality–virtuality continuum. Research has shown that a set of characteristics of narrative game-based learning has positive effects on engagement, motivation, and learning. The eLuna Framework comprises a co-design method and a visual language that emphasizes these characteristics, and that supports educators and game developers to co-specify blueprints of screen-based narrative learning game experiences. Applying thematic analysis and heuristic usability methods to interview data from two design studies completed by six science center educators based on a STEAM enabled exhibit cluster at the Bergen Science Centre VilVite, this research extends the eLuna Visual Language to distinguish between real and virtual elements for the eLuna Framework to achieve its full potential to co-design and co-specify science center mixed reality narrative game-based learning trails. The resulting extension can be plugged into the eLuna method and applied in future co-design and co-specification of mixed-reality narrative game-based learning trails which promote flow in learners, and affords positive effects on engagement, motivation, and learning.

Abstract During the last fifty years many of the world's political systems have learned to perform new operations they could not perform before. The challenges that face humankind now and in the next decades will require even more dramatic learning, invention and innovation. Conditions for increased learning performance that pertain to any large system help to clarify how societies and political systems learn. What will it mean to tune our educational systems to increase our learning capacity, to facilitate our transition to an intensive information society and to meet the economic, political and social challenges of the coming decades?

The present situation of foreign workers in West Germany can only be adequately understood if one takes explicit discrimination in job allocation into account. Foreigners are kept longer than Germans in stressful entry-level jobs and are blocked in their advancement to better positions. As part of the secondary labour market of big industrial firms, they do not only serve as a reservoir of flexibility in transfers; they are also more likely to lose their jobs in a period of redundancies. The thesis is put forward that contrary to many expectations about the rational behaviour of single capital units management discriminates against foreign workers in order to gain the compliance of the majority workforce and to achieve social peace in the plants. Selective personnel policies only work as smoothly as they do because there is also a selective representation of labour interests, which put Germans first and foreigners second. Although successful in sheltering the German core workforce against the threat of job losses to some extent, this selective representation of interests may in the long run imply the danger of an ethnic polarization within the labour movement.