This paper compared two collaborative activities for college students' integration of research pieces of cognitive science. One is the jigsaw method that assigns different pieces to different students and makes them exchange what they learn. The other is a simpler type of collaboration that gives all pieces to all students in a serial order. Comparing the results, we found that the jigsaw promo...

Spatial reasoning ability is enhanced by spatial activities and spatial language. Spatial games (e.g., block building, assembling jigsaw puzzles) are often accompanied by spatial language, which, in turn, is often accompanied by co-speech gesture. Here we investigate the effects of spatial language and gesture in the context of puzzle play in improving preschool children’s puzzle assembly abili...

Many online courses fail to promote the active construction of student knowledge or camaraderie among student peers. Accordingly, online course designers and instructors are challenged to promote purposeful peer student dialogue and establish a sense of belonging where all learners perceive themselves as stakeholders in the course community. Online role playing is not a common activity, and ele...

Cooperative approach presents an example of an “innovative approach” (Ellis, 2003) that constitutes a paradigm shift in the area of language teaching. Instructors, principals and administrators continue to search for effective and reliable instructional strategies. The present study attempted to provide a comprehensive examination of the effects off the jigsaw teaching method on the success of ...

Using memoization and various other optimization techniques, the number of dissections of the n × n square into n polyominoes of size n is computed for n ≤ 8. On this task our method outperforms Donald Knuth’s Algorithm X with Dancing Links. The number of jigsaw sudoku puzzle solutions is computed for n ≤ 7. For every jigsaw sudoku puzzle polyomino cover with n ≤ 6 the size of its smallest crit...

This paper presents an innovative description of the Jigsaw collaboration method within the context of open source e-learning ‘Learning Design’-based systems such as LAMS, with special reference to the learning of essential issues in Computer Science. These issues include: (a) the wide range of computer technology used in daily life and the consequences of such utilization, (b) the variety of c...

Cortical microtubules (MTs) participate in the spatial control of cell expansion and division that is required for plant growth and morphogenesis. Well-ordered transverse cortical MTs promote cell elongation and restrict radial cell expansion. The molecular mechanism controlling their ordering is poorly understood. We report the first known signaling pathway that promotes the organization of co...

E-Government, today, is being regarded as the panacea for many of the conventional government ills, such as rampant corruption in developing countries to costly service deliveries in the developed countries. This paper provides a quick introduction to the e-government and proceeds on to describe a new framework developed for the transition of a government into an egovernment – more specific to ...

This paper proposes several actvites that encourage self-learning in engineering courses. For each actvity, the context and the pedagogical issues addressed are described emphasizing strengths and weaknesses. Specifcally, this work describes and implements fve actvites, which are: questonnaires, conceptual maps, videos, jigsaw and projects. These actvites are applied in seven diferent knowledge...