Drama, theater and role-playing methods are commonly used in health promotion programs, but evidence of their effectiveness is limited. This paper describes the development, implementation and evaluation of a school-based drama program to enhance social relationships and decrease bullying at school in children in grades 4-5 (mean age of 10.4 years). Students (n = 190) were recruited from two pr...

It is widely known that Aristotle rules out the existence of actual infinities but allows for potential infinities. However, precisely why Aristotle should deny the existence of actual infinities remains somewhat obscure and has received relatively little attention in the secondary literature. In this paper I investigate the motivations of Aristotle’s finitism and offer a careful examination of...

Aristotelian, or non-Platonist, realism holds that mathematics is a science of the real world, just as much as biology or sociology are. Where biology studies living things and sociology studies human social relations, mathematics studies the quantitative or structural aspects of things, such as ratios, or patterns, or complexity, or numerosity, or symmetry. Let us start with an example, as Ari...

I argue that a modern gloss on Aristotle’s notions of Form and Matter not only allows us to escape a dualism of the psychological and the physical, but also results in a plausible sort of materialism. This is because Aristotle held that the essential nature of any psychological state, including perception and human thought, is to be some physical property. I also show that Hilary Putnam and Mar...

Aristotle's theory of causation has multiple threads, and his texts invite multiple interpretations. The variation in interpretation is, in part, a result of different perspectives and questions that are brought to the text. For instance, Aristotle's theory of the four causes has invited scrutiny from contemporary philosophers of science, who are interested in theories of explanation (van Fraas...

Media studies research of the 1990s illustrated an incongruity between cultural diversity in the Australian community with the representation of that diversity on commercial television screens. Australian drama in particular received much criticism for its seemingly “Anglo” portrayal of Australian society. Most of this former research was based on program content analysis and critical approache...

Computer-based highly interactive drama involves different authoring approaches, compared to linear media. Underlying design principles needs to be understood in order to guide the authoring process, to teach authors and to design better systems. This paper identifies a fundamental design principle termed Structural Writing that underlies some of the most generative approaches in interactive dr...

This paper introduces the novel concept of location-based Mobile Urban Dramas. In a Mobile Urban Drama the user become the main character in a play where actors’ voices appear in the mobile phone headset linked to the physical setting in the city as the stage for the drama. The paper describes the dramaturgical concept and introduces a software framework supporting drama writers in developing s...

In this work, we propose integrating a drama manager into a visual novel to guide both storytelling and health intervention. We discuss certain narrative structures that can be used to guide a visual-novel-based health intervention and can potentially benefit future drama manager research. A Visual Novel for Health Care There has been a growing interest in developing and evaluating “games for h...