Abstract: "In spite of the efficacy of Operations Research (OR), its tools are still
underused, due to the difficulties that people experience when describing a
problem through a mathematical model. For this reason, teaching how to approach
and model complex problems is still an open issue. A strong relation exists
between (video) games and learning: for this reason we explore to which
extent (real time) simulation video games could be envisaged to be an innovative,
stimulating and compelling approach to teach OR techniques."
Experiments by University of Chicago psychologists with deaf people in Nicaragua who learned "homesigns" rather than formal sign language, could not count beyond three. In contrast, people learning sign language learn number words and number concept and understand large numbers. The findings ""suggest that language is an important player in number acquisition." The research is reported in PNAS: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/31/1015975108.abstract