How to promote healthy eating habits in children

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA ��� School of Business and Economics

English Language Learning Inside and Outside the Classroom in Portugal

This study investigates the way of learning the English language in Portugal. First-year students of the faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of New University of Lisbon were selected as participants in the case study. As data collection tools a questionnaire and focus-groups were used. 115 students completed the designed questionnaire and after that 12 students were selected for the more detailed focus-group discussions. Results of the research show that most part of the students�� English knowledge is received from outside the classroom by means of movies, songs, computer games, the Internet, communication with friends and other sources. Also, the results show that motivation is very important in language learning process and motivated students acquire the language faster and easier.

How to promote healthy eating habits in children

Childhood���s overweight and obesity are a worrying issue in the world nowadays. The purpose of this study was to provide contributions to the promotion of healthy food by analyzing the impact of physical activity, parents��� influence and home meals frequency on children���s food choices. Structured questionnaires were used and were answered by 172 children between 10 and 14 years old and by their respective parents. Children and parents preferred healthy food vs. non-healthy food presenting the children���s healthy food choices a mean of 4.26 and the parent���s healthy food choices a mean of 4.47 in a scale ranging from 0 to 6. Our results also show that physical activity, parent���s education and home meals frequency did not have an impact on children���s food choices, contrasting to the sedentary behavior and parents��� choices which had a negative and positive correlation, respectively, with children���s food choices. Taking these results into account and using them to advise parents and companies, we underline that parents must guarantee an adequate children���s nutrition after doing physical efforts and control the time children watch TV and play computer games and companies may create marketing campaigns and educational programs in order to promote healthy food, improve children���s eating habits and reduce the childhood obesity prevalence.

Playing Newtonian Games with Modellus

This article is a short introduction on how to use Modellus (a computer package that is freely available on the Internet and used in the IOP Advancing Physics course) to build physics games using Newton���s laws, expressed as differential equations. Solving systems of differential equations is beyond most secondary-school or first-year college students. However, with Modellus, the solution is simply the output of the usual physical reasoning: define the force law, compute its magnitude and components, use it to obtain the acceleration components, then the velocity components and, finally, use the velocity components to find the coordinates.

Mobile image processing to support educational geometry games

The mobile IT era is here, it is still growing and expanding at a steady rate and, most of all, it is entertaining. Mobile devices are used for entertainment, whether social through the so-called social networks, or private through web browsing, video watching or gaming. Youngsters make heavy use of these devices, and even small children show impressive adaptability and skill. However not much attention is directed towards education, especially in the case of young children. Too much time is usually spent in games which only purpose is to keep children entertained, time that could be put to better use such as developing elementary geometric notions. Taking advantage of this pocket computer scenario, it is proposed an application geared towards small children in the 6 ��� 9 age group that allows them to consolidate knowledge regarding geometric shapes, forming a stepping stone that leads to some fundamental mathematical knowledge to be exercised later on. To achieve this goal, the application will detect simple geometric shapes like squares, circles and triangles using the device���s camera. The novelty of this application will be a core real-time detection system designed and developed from the ground up for mobile devices, taking into account their characteristic limitations such as reduced processing power, memory and battery. User feedback was be gathered, aggregated and studied to assess the educational factor of the application.

Culturtainment - a new interactive entertainment genre: assessment of Cultural Heritage digital content in leisure software games

European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Administration

Learning with tangible interfaces

Trabalho apresentado no ��mbito do Mestrado em Engenharia Inform��tica, como requisito parcial para obten����o do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Inform��tica

Acceleration of physics simulation engine through OpenCL

Disserta����o para obten����o do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Inform��tica

Computer-supported cooperative work:alguns temas de investiga����o

Os primeiros trabalhos sobre Computer-Supported Cooperative Work surgiram na segunda metade da d��cada de 80, estabelecendo-se um campo de investiga����o interdisciplinar com enfoque no papel do computador e das tecnologias da comunica����o no apoio do trabalho em grupo (Ishii et al., 1994). Ao abordar esta ��rea de investiga����o torna-se claro que �� necess��rio ter em conta a diversidade dos grupos e das tarefas que estes devem de utilizar, entre outros factores importantes. As implica����es desta diversidade s��o discutidas ao n��vel concep����o de interfaces de groupware, em que um maior envolvimento dos utilizadores nas fases iniciais parece ser necess��rio, e ao n��vel dos Sistemas de Apoio �� Decis��o em Grupo.

Bridging present and future of brain-computer interfaces: an assessment of impacts

Based on the report for the ���Project III��� unit of the PhD programme on Technology Assessment under the supervision of Prof. Ant��nio B. Moniz. This report was discussed also at the 2nd Winter School on Technology Assessment held at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Caparica Campus, Portugal on December 2011.

Brain-computer interface (BCI): a methodological proposal to assess the impacts of medical applications in 2022

Based on the report for ���Project IV��� unit of the PhD programme on Technology Assessment (Doctoral Conference) at Universidade Nova de Lisboa (December 2011). This thesis research has the supervision of Ant��nio Moniz (FCT-UNL and ITAS-KIT) and Armin Grunwald (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology-ITAS, Germany). Other members of the thesis committee are M��rio Forjaz Secca (FCT-UNL) and Femke Nijboer (University of Twente, Netherlands).

Interactive acquisition of spatial information from images for multimedia applications

Disserta����o para obten����o do Grau de Doutor em Inform��tica

Purification of complex biopharmaceuticals with new processes, advanced analytics and computer-aided process design tools

Disserta����o para obten����o do Grau de Mestre em Biotecnologia

A framework for developing motion-based games

Disserta����o para obten����o do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Inform��tica

An existence result for discontinuous games

We introduce a notion of upper semicontinuity, weak upper semicontinuity, and show that it, together with a weak form of payoff security, is enough to guarantee the existence of Nash equilibria in compact, quasiconcave normal form games. We show that our result generalizes the pure strategy existence theorem of Dasgupta and Maskin (1986) and that it is neither implied nor does it imply the existence theorems of Baye, Tian, and Zhou (1993) and Reny (1999). Furthermore, we show that an equilibrium may fail to exist when, while maintaining weak payoff security, weak upper semicontinuity is weakened to reciprocal upper semicontinuity.