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Limited special education and related services are available for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Macau, especially those who are educated in general education classrooms. No intervention study has been conducted on these children. This study was conducted to explore the relationship between a board game play intervention and board game play behaviors and social communication of children with ASD educated in general education classrooms in Macau. A repeated measures design was used and the results of this study showed the mean occurrence of unprompted board game play behaviors per session during intervention was not significantly different from that during pre- or post-intervention. The mean occurrence of social communication per session during intervention was significantly higher than that during pre- and post-intervention. These findings suggest a positive relationship existed between the board game intervention used in this study and social communication of children with ASD.

The key challenge of Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) for analyzing time series data is to learn domain-invariant representations by capturing complex temporal dependencies. In addition, existing unsupervised domain adaptation methods for time series data are designed to align marginal distribution between source and target domains. However, existing UDA methods (e.g. R-DANN Purushotham et al. (2017), VRADA Purushotham et al. (2017), CoDATS Wilson et al. (2020)) neglect the conditional distribution discrepancy between two domains, leading to misclassification of the target domain. Therefore, to learn domain-invariant representations by capturing the temporal dependencies and to reduce the conditional distribution discrepancy between two domains, a novel Attentive Recurrent Adversarial Domain Adaptation with Top-k time series pseudo-labeling method called ARADA-TK is proposed in this paper. In the experiments, our proposed method was compared with the state-of-the-art UDA methods (R-DANN, VRADA and CoDATS). Experimental results on four benchmark datasets revealed that ARADA-TK achieves superior classification accuracy when it is compared to the competing methods.

This chapter describes how intellectual capital comprising human capital, structural capital, and relational capital are being created for school development and quality assurance in Macau. Macau has aimed to catch up with the global education reform by subsidising majorities of the non-tertiary sectors and promulgating Decree Laws regarding education policies and development. Despite the significance of the intangible assets of the intellectual capital, the chapter also attempts to analyse the issues and challenges towards the management of intellectual capital emerging simultaneously in the transition process in the educational context of Macau. It suggests capitalising on the accumulated school knowledge for school effectiveness. This chapter depicts the chronological development of Macau's education reform by analysing how Macau has attempted to emancipate its education institutions from the period of quasi-closed system to that of the open system by creating different types of intellectual capital in school. It discusses the emerging issues and challenges simultaneously in the transition process of educational development in Macau, namely before and after returning its sovereignty to the Chinese government.

People with intellectual disabilities need vocational training and support in order to be able to get into the work market and maintain their workplace. In Macau SAR, China, the vocational training ecosystem still operates in fully classic, in-person, fashion, which means it is susceptible to pandemic situations such as COVID-19. This causes a big disruption to the training when isolation measures are in place. Our goal is to study the introduction of serious games for vocational training of people with disabilities in Macau. This work presents a study to assess the training benefits of serious games and usability factors, understand the acceptability and adoption factors/benefits of serious games for vocational training for people with intellectual disabilities and associated stakeholders in Macau.

Resumo O fascínio do Ocidente pela dicção poética oriental está atestado em várias latitudes e línguas, e resultou numa profícua produção na área da poesia. Sabe-se que a reinvenção da poesia chinesa da autoria de Pound, em grande medida na origem da sua proposta de revolução do idioma poético, nas primeiras décadas do séc. XX, assentou, na verdade, numa falácia; numa concepção errada da natureza da escrita chinesa (e japonesa) como essencialmente pictográfica e ideogramática, na base de propriedades expressivas reconhecidas na poesia que resultariam numa particular eficácia na apreensão e tradução do real. Pessanha enaltece, em termos similares aos da exaltação poundiana, a escrita da poesia chinesa clássica. Interessa-nos rever alguns inventários dos traços da dicção poética chinesa e japonesa que explicam que ela seja tomada como metonímia e metáfora da poesia, ou como meta e utopia da poesia, para perceber o que terá levado autores muito díspares a tentar a mão nos haikus, processo em que sondaremos algumas formulações poéticas em língua portuguesa. Consideramos também que esse fascínio por uma (sonhada) origem da dicção poética, quando cruzada com o habitar (não metafórico, neste caso) do pequenino enclave de Macau, de autores que nele lançaram raízes, resultou em alguns exercícios poéticos particularmente felizes e singulares. Serão trazidos à colação nesta abordagem poemas de Eugénio de Andrade, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, José Tolentino Mendonça, Yao Feng, Fernanda Dias e Fernando Sales Lopes.

Despite the prevalence of aesthetic education as one of the main developmental objectives in curricular worldwide, the mainstream philosophical discourse on its definition is predominately framed by western philosophy due to a paucity of cross-cultural studies on the subject. The article aims to achieve a contemporary understanding of aesthetic education from both the Chinese and Western aesthetic perspectives. Through the lens of postmodernism, the relationship between Daoist aesthetics and the western postmodern aesthetic perspectives, particularly the Deleuzian concept of rhizome, is identified. Both aesthetic perspectives concern de-authorship and promote self-consciousness/self-awareness. The study reconceptualises the functions of aesthetic education with the Chinese aesthetic philosophy that promotes the nurture of better people through benevolence.

It has become increasingly clear that the early use of decomposition for addition is associated with later mathematical achievement. This study examined how younger children execute a base-10 decomposition strategy to solve complex arithmetic (e.g. two-digit addition). 24 addition problems in two modalities (WA: Written Arithmetic; OA: Oral Arithmetic) with sums less than 100 were administered to 22 Japanese and 22 Singaporean 6-year-old kindergarteners. Our findings reveal that they were able to solve complex addition. For instance, Japanese kindergarteners tended to solve complex arithmetic using base-10 decomposition across the modality, whereas Singaporean kindergarteners used standard algorithms and basic counting to solve complex WA and OA problems, respectively. We speculate that Japanese kindergarteners might have a clearer understanding of the base-10 concept and were able to use this knowledge more readily than Singaporean kindergarteners. Mathematical experiences in kindergarten and number-naming systems have been put forward as two of the crucial contributors for such cross-cultural differences. This study also provides new directions for future research on the understanding of the base-10 concept and its application among young children.

The research explores the perceptions of five secondary school students with special education needs (SEN) about their participation in learning, group membership, and agency within an inclusive school in Macau SAR. This goal is achieved by using students' voices documented in open-ended interviews and is underpinned by the conceptual framework of heutagogy. The aim is to shed light on students' perceptions on school effectiveness in supporting their needs through successful participation and agentic possibilities. Findings showed that students were more prone to social rejection and being isolated or bullied than their peers. They were struggling to feel included or participate, their needs were only partially being met, and they had few opportunities to exert influence on their educational trajectories. Recommendations are provided to assist educators and schools in enhancing students with SEN to connect to the learning process and community, with the provision of appropriate learning adjustments and more active approaches to ensure their acceptance by mainstream students, including the formation of coaching peers to assist in developing social and academic skills under teacher's scaffolding practices. This study highlights the contribution of the heutagogical perspective to advance research on the participation and agency of students with SEN in mainstream schools.

This contribution to the special issue is an historical account of Paulo Freire’s pedagogical and administrative praxis before his forced exile in 1964. It relies on interviews collected during a field trip in 1976, a conversation with Paulo Freire in Geneva one year later and on the secondary literature up to date. Being the head of the first Extension Service of a major Brazilian university in the early 1960s gave Freire and his collaborators the space and time to experiment with the today world famous literacy method bearing his name. The concept of ‘Field of Cultural Production’ (Bourdieu) is used to elucidate better Freire and his team’s avant-gardist production within the spaces opened up by Brazil’s popular movements in the early sixties. The contribution shows how the ‘Paulo Freire System’ developed in the praxis of a cultural movement and received its academic consecration in an incremental and eclectic style.

The Mesozoic gold deposits in the North China Craton (NCC) were hosted by the Precambrian basement and Mesozoic intrusions. Thus, most researchers consider that these gold deposits were genetically linked to the Mesozoic intrusions. However, we suggest that a metamorphic devolatilization model provides an alternative based on a combined Fe and in-situ S isotopes study on auriferous pyrites from the Baiyun gold deposit in the NCC. The Triassic Baiyun gold deposit contains the quartz vein and altered rock ores that were developed in the Paleoproterozoic metavolcanic-sedimentary rocks (the Liaohe Group). Our in-situ S isotopic analyses show that pyrites from the quartz vein ores are characterized by negative δ34S values (-10.7 ∼ -5.5‰), while those from the altered rock ores have two distinct groups of δ34S values, one being positive (+13.5 ∼ +16.2‰) and the other negative (-10.6 ∼ -3.0‰). We suggest that pyrite grains with positive δ34S values should be relicts from the host rocks, because they show comparable δ34S values with those from the host rocks schists (+3.3 ∼ +16.1‰). Thus, only the negative δ34S values of pyrites in ores (-10.7 ∼ -3.0‰) and the Fe isotopes of the quartz vein ores (δ56Fe = +0.30 ∼ +0.48‰) can represent the isotopic characteristics of ore-forming fluids at Baiyun. Our study shows that the sulfur were probably from the pyritic volcanic-sedimentary sequences of the Liaohe Group, rather than from magmas. The calculated δ56Fe values of the ore-forming fluids (-0.78 ∼ -0.37‰; pyrite-fluid isotope fractionation) could be modelled in a metamorphic devolatilization model with Fe-species (pyrite&magnetite) of the Liaohe Group as sources. Therefore, our combined S- and Fe- isotope data indicate that the metamorphic devolatilization of the Liaohe Group could account for the genesis of the Baiyun gold deposit.

The objective of this case study is to analyze how two groups of parents, a group who have newly arrived in Macau from Mainland China and the other who have resided in Macau for more than three decades, interact with the class teachers at the levels of ?two-way communication,? ?supervision of children at home,? and ?participating in decision making? in a secondary school. The findings will redound to the benefits of school leaders, teachers, and indirectly the parents in a sense that looking closely at the ethnic and cultural differences between parents can promote effective cooperation between parents and teachers.

Medical classification is affected by many factors, and the traditional medical classification is usually restricted by factors such as too long text, numerous categories and so on. In order to solve these problems, this paper uses word vector and word vector to mine the text deeply, considering the problem of scattered key features of medical text, introducing long-term and short-term memory network to effectively retain the features of historical information in long text sequence, and using the structure of CNN to extract local features of text, through attention mechanism to obtain key features, considering the problems of many diseases, by using hierarchical classification. To stratify the disease. Combined with the above ideas, a deep DLCF model suitable for long text and multi-classification is designed. This model has obvious advantages in CMDD and other datasets. Compared with the baseline models, this model is superior to the baseline model in accuracy, recall and other indicators.

Traditional text classification models have some drawbacks, such as the inability of the model to focus on important parts of the text contextual information in text processing. To solve this problem, we fuse the long and short-term memory network BiGRU with a convolutional neural network to receive text sequence input to reduce the dimensionality of the input sequence and to reduce the loss of text features based on the length and context dependency of the input text sequence. Considering the extraction of important features of the text, we choose the long and short-term memory network BiLSTM to capture the main features of the text and thus reduce the loss of features. Finally, we propose a BiGRU-CNN-BiLSTM model (DCRC model) based on CNN, GRU and LSTM, which is trained and validated on the THUCNews and Toutiao News datasets. The model outperformed the traditional model in terms of accuracy, recall and F1 score after experimental comparison.

Recently, a lot of Chinese patients consult treatment plans through social networking platforms, but the Chinese medical text contains rich information, including a large number of medical nomenclatures and symptom descriptions. How to build an intelligence model to automatically classify the text information consulted by patients and recommend the correct department for patients is very important. In order to address the problem of insufficient feature extraction from Chinese medical text and low accuracy, this paper proposes a dual channel Chinese medical text classification model. The model extracts feature of Chinese medical text at different granularity, comprehensively and accurately obtains effective feature information, and finally recommends departments for patients according to text classification. One channel of the model focuses on medical nomenclatures, symptoms and other words related to hospital departments, gives different weights, calculates corresponding feature vectors with convolution kernels of different sizes, and then obtains local text representation. The other channel uses the BiGRU network and attention mechanism to obtain text representation, highlighting the important information of the whole sentence, that is, global text representation. Finally, the model uses full connection layer to combine the representation vectors of the two channels, and uses Softmax classifier for classification. The experimental results show that the accuracy, recall and F1-score of the model are improved by 10.65%, 8.94% and 11.62% respectively compared with the baseline models in average, which proves that our model has better performance and robustness.

Hydrology modeling became a relevant topic for the Cidade da Praia, Cabo Verde, Africa, due to negative impact risk to local population and its assets. The modeling via Geographical Information Systems (GIS) can help the decision-making process of space occupation and characterization for this type of risk. Under the municipalities of Praia, the phenomenon of flash flood is common, causing soil erosion and landslide. This constitutes a risk for the local habitat, particularly in districts with a lack of strong human infrastructures. To simulate, analyze and generate risk maps using GIS to help this county governance authorities for decision-making, thus, becomes the main aim of this article.

We know from research that there is an intimate relationship between student learning and the context of learning. What is not known or understood well enough is the relationship of the students’ background and previous studies to the understanding and learning of the subject area—here, computer science (CS). To show the contextual influences on learning CS, we present empirical data from a qualitative investigation of the experiences of Chinese students studying for a master degree at Sweden's Uppsala University. Data were collected of the students’ understanding and learning of CS, their experience of the teaching and their own studies, and of their personal development in Sweden. Using an analysis framework grounded in phenomenography, we analytically separated the what and how aspects of learning. In this article, we describe the what, or the content of the students’ learning, and identify dimensions of variation in the experiences of students. These dimensions relate to the foci of the CS programs, the learning outcomes, and the impact of the studies. The findings from the analyses indicate pedagogical and pragmatic implications for teaching and learning CS in higher education institutions. The study extends the traditional use of phenomenography through the discussion of the dimensions of variation in the experiences and the values within the dimensions. It opens the way for understanding the relational nature of learning in computing education.

This article reviews the role that the Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) plays in China’s cultural and public diplomacy through training programmes organised by the Macao Forum and tailored for the elite of the world’s Portuguese-speaking countries (PSCs). It begins with a review of China’s approach to key instruments of its soft-power offensive and strategy towards the developing world, followed by an overview of Beijing’s linkages with each PSC. Formulated as an expression of China’s cultural diplomacy towards the PSCs, the seminars of the Macao Forum serve as a kind of cooperation in which the provider party—rather than delivering tangible goods and services such as food, money, loans or infrastructure—actually offers grey matter in the form of ideas for initiatives in public policies and reforms, in order to foster further economic development and administrative rationalisation. Adding to an intense debate and substantial literature that discuss quantitatively and qualitatively China’s role in and aid provision to Africa, the authors argue that China, through the Macao Forum’s training programmes, courts the developing PSCs by building the capacity of their human capital, targeting in particular those in the public and private sectors who are in a position to implement their ideas.

During the past two years, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have created wide interest in the academic world raising both enthusiasm for new opportunities for universities and many concerns for the future of university education. The discussion has mainly appeared in non-scientific forums, such as magazine articles, columns and blogs, making it difficult to judge wider opinions within academia. To collect more rigorous data we surveyed teachers, researchers, and academic managers on their opinions and experiences of MOOCs. In this paper, we present our analysis of responses from the computer science academic community (n=137). Their feelings about MOOCs are highly mixed. Content analysis of open-ended questions revealed that the most often mentioned positive aspects included affordances of MOOCs, freedom of time and location for studying, and the possibility to experience teaching from top-level international teachers/experts. The most common negative aspects included concerns about pedagogical designs of MOOCs, assessment practices, and lack of interaction with the teacher. About half the respondents claimed they had not changed their teaching as a result of MOOCs, a small number used MOOCs as learning resources and very few were engaging with MOOCs in any significant way.

Phenomenography is a well-known empirical research approach that is often used to investigate students' ways of learning programming. Phenomenographic pedagogy is an instructional approach to plan learning and teaching activities. This theoretical paper gives an overview of prior research in phenomenographic studies of programming and shows how the results from these research studies can be applied to course design. Pedagogic principles grounded in the phenomenographic perspective on teaching and learning are then presented that consider how to tie students' experiences to the course goals (relevance structure) and how to apply variation theory to focus on the desired critical aspects of learning. Building on this, an introductory object-oriented programming course is described as an example of research-based course design. The insights gained from the experience of running the course are shared with the community of computer science educators, as also the benefits and responsibilities for those who wish to adopt the phenomenographic perspective on learning to plan their teaching. The development of an increased awareness of the variation in students' ways of experiencing programming and the need to broaden the context of the programming course are discussed.