The Didactics Applied to Care discipline is developed in the fifth semester of the nursing graduation course. It develops several theoretical-practical contents, among them, the teaching strategy. Our objective is to report the experience with the use of puppet theater to promote the oral health of children in a day nursery in the São Paulo East Zone. With this report we make it clear that the ...

Meiosis is a special type of cell division by which sexually reproducing organisms maintain their chromosome number across generations. This process produces haploid gametes by two successive rounds of cell division preceded by a unique DNA replication event. During the first meiotic prophase, the homologous chromosomes form stable bivalents, a process which implies their recognition, with a su...

The HandySinger system is a personified tool developed to naturally express a singing voice controlled by the gestures of a hand puppet. Assuming that a singing voice is a kind of musical expression, natural expressions of the singing voice are important for personification. We adopt a singing voice morphing algorithm that effectively smoothes out the strength of expressions delivered with a si...

Grice (Syntax and semantics: Speech acts, 1975, pp. 41-58, Vol. 3) proposed that conversation is guided by a spirit of cooperation that involves adherence to several conversational maxims. Three types of maxims were explored in the current study: 1) Quality, to be truthful; 2) Relation, to say only what is relevant to a conversation; and 3) Quantity, to provide as much information as required. ...

In two studies, the authors investigated 2- and 3-year-old children's awareness of the normative structure of conventional games. In the target conditions, an experimenter showed a child how to play a simple rule game. After the child and the experimenter had played for a while, a puppet came (controlled by a 2nd experimenter), asked to join in, and then performed an action that constituted a m...

Caregivers' emotional responses to children influence children's social and emotional development. This study investigated the association between maternal emotional expressiveness in the context of mother-child interactions and young children's sensitivity to teacher criticism. Sensitivity to teacher criticism was assessed among 53 Japanese preschoolers using hypothetical scenarios in which a ...

It is now possible to capture the 3D motion of the human body on consumer hardware and to puppet in real time skeleton-based virtual characters. However, many characters do not have humanoid skeletons. Characters such as spiders and caterpillars do not have boned skeletons at all, and these characters have very different shapes and motions. In general, character control under arbitrary shape an...

The German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) recently started three new projects1 to advance our understanding of the fundamental technology required to drive the social behaviour of interactive animated agents. This initiative has been timed to catch the current wave of research and commercial interest in the field of lifelike characters [1] and affective user interfaces [14,2...