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Early interventions focusing on exercise and lifestyle are important for individuals with a diagnosis of psychosis due to increased risk of poor physical health and reduced life expectancy. This study aims to test the feasibility of a multicomponent lifestyle intervention for individuals with first episode psychosis (FEP).

Individuals attending an Irish FEP service were invited to engage in an eight-week programme including individual and group exercise sessions, group educational sessions and one dietician consultation. Physical activity, physical health, mental health, cognition and personal goals measures were completed pre- and post-intervention and analysed using descriptive statistics. Feasibility data was collected via a non-standardised participant questionnaire and informal data on completion of measures and engagement with the programme.

Ten participants with a diagnosis of FEP completed the intervention. Participants were satisfied with the intervention and adherence rates were high for weekly individual gym sessions but lower for group exercise and education sessions. Mean time spent engaging in physical activity increased and sedentary behaviours decreased. Participants indicated increased readiness for change with 90% moving to the action or maintenance stages of change. Participants attained 74% of their personal goals. There were no changes in average body mass index, cognition or mental health. Data relating to blood pressure, blood tests and steps was missing or incomplete.

This study indicates an eight-week exercise and lifestyle programme is feasible and acceptable in a clinical setting. Recommendations relating to satisfaction, clinical markers and resource requirements are made for future studies.

Active computer gaming (ACG) is a way for older people to participate in strength and balance exercise. Involving older adults in the development of a bespoke ACG system may optimise its usability and acceptability. The purpose of this paper is to employ user-centred design to develop an ACG system to deliver strength and balance exercises, and to explore its safety, usability and acceptability in older adults.

This paper describes user involvement from an early stage, and its influence on the development of the system to deliver strength and balance exercise suitable for display on a flat screen or using an Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) headset. It describes user testing of this ACG system in older adults.

Service users were involved at two points in the development process. Their feedback was used to modify the ACG system prior to user testing of a prototype of the ACG system by n=9 older adults. Results indicated the safety, usability and acceptability of the system, with a strong preference for the screen display.

The sample size for user testing was small; however, it is considered to have provided sufficient information to inform the further development of the system.

Findings from user testing were used to modify the ACG system. This paper identified that future research could explore the influence of repeated use on the usability and acceptability of ACG in older adults.

There is limited information on the usability and acceptability VR headsets in this population.

Computer‐based systems for motor function rehabilitation have been around for more than a decade, with work done to help recovery of function in the lower limb (ankle, leg) as well as upper limb (hand and arm).

More recently there has been a trend towards the use of game‐based systems to deliver rehabilitation goals. The authors' interdisciplinary group has been working in the area of motor function recovery of the hand and arm (following stroke) for a number of years, using both high‐end virtual reality (VR) technology as well as low‐cost video capture technology.

Over this time it has become clear that there are many challenges in designing usable, effective game‐based systems for motor function rehabilitation.

This paper reflects on user experiences across the range of technologies developed by the group. It presents a summary review of the authors' systems and details the protocols and user evaluation instruments used. It then critically reflects on this work and reviews other recent advances in game usability and playability, leading to suggestions for how the user experience of games for rehabilitation may be improved in future work.

Sanctions are normally used as an instrument by one country or an alliance of countries to affect change in the behaviour of another country. As Ian Anthony has noted, “Within the legal code of states, sanctions are that part of a law that inflicts a penalty for its violation. In common usage, international sanctions can be defined as any restriction or condition established for reasons of foreign policy or national security applied to a foreign country or entity by a group of states using substantially equivalent measures” (Anthony, 2002, p. 204). Most analysts would agree that clearly defined goals on the part of the initiator – and outlining a consistent set of policies with respect to such goals – are an important factor in gauging the effectiveness of sanctions at any given time.

Fairy tales were first transmitted orally to teach the community to adapt and engage with their surroundings (Zipes, 1987, p. 1). Nonetheless, they have also contributed to reproduce traditional gender roles and stereotypes (Meland, 2020, p. 912). Indeed, they encourage ‘females to become passive self-denying, obedient, and self-sacrificial’, and males to ‘be competitive, authoritarian, and power-hungry as well as rational, abstract, and principled’ (Zipes, 1987, p. 3). Likewise, Western fairy tales are characterised by a racial dichotomy manifested through the uses of colour: purity is usually associated with white, while black is related to death. This binary opposition suggests that ‘[w]hiteness is often the invisible, privileged state, whereas any other skin colour is marked and laden with ideological judgments’ (Jorgensen, 2013, p. 56).

Carnival Row (2019–2023) is a neo-Victorian TV series created for Amazon Studios that rewrites Western fairy tales through the lens of postcolonial and gender studies. It is set in a fantastically reimagined Victorian England, where mythological creatures – e.g. fairies or centaurs – are allegorical representations of the ethnic Other. The male protagonist of this series, Philo, is a ‘half-breed’ – half human, half fairy – who passes as human to avoid racial discrimination. However, he evolves from being a male character who rejects his ethnic identity to a heroic figure who eventually embraces his racial origins at the end of Season 1. As I demonstrate in this chapter, Philo's nuanced development arguably subverts traditional depictions of white male heroes in fairy-tale narratives, where they tend to be portrayed as strong, principled and non-complex characters.

Children are the primary group most affected by all sorts of social and political developments in a society, whether negative or positive. The disintegration of the social fabric, the destabilisation of a country and the breakdown of political and social security pose a greater threat to children and expose them to greater harm compared to other social strata. Children, whose family integrity in cities, villages and towns has been reduced to dust by the civil war that has raged in Afghanistan for over 40 years, are the most exposed to this violence. Millions of Afghan children have been deprived of modern educational opportunities. On the other hand, the children have been forced to bear the economic burden of the household due to the loss of the source of income for the families as the fathers died in terror attacks. Add to this the psychological problems suffered by the children, as well as the physical abuse of boys, a bitter and archaic picture emerges. In addition, girls are forced to be married off to influential older men, sometimes the age of their grandfathers, and boys are given weapons at an early age, only to be offered to unlawful organisations as fighters to be deployed in conflict zones after harsh and difficult training. This threatens the very nature of what human and children's rights stand for. In this study, using the figures and statistics from UNICEF, Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and other institutions such situations of human rights and children's rights in this country are analysed.

Even though it has already been 25 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the regaining of independence for the Republic of Latvia, teacher education faces various and specific problems brought forth by the experience behind the ‘iron curtain’, spanning five decades. Ever since regaining its independence, Latvia has implemented ambitious education reforms. A new education reform has been launched in Latvia, which start to implement the competency approach in general education by 2018. A vital aspect of this reform is teacher education. In preparing teachers, universities have an extra task – to promote competency of the future teachers to implement the competency approach in schools, in a student-centred study process. The organisation process must change during the university study process in order to accommodate that the future teachers acquire actual competencies by using modern technologies and modern learning strategies, thus later promoting active involvement of students in the construction of their competencies.

This study carried out a survey of 170 students of the teacher education programme at the University of Latvia and revealed problem areas that should be changed in the teacher education process to ensure that the future teachers are able to implement the competency approach in schools. IBM SPSS Statistics 22 was used to analyse data. The research objective was to learn student-teachers’ ability to implement competency approach in their pedagogical work.

The digitisation of various parts of society is developing at an increasingly rapid rate, which effects the way people receive services and how familiar they are with new innovations and technological challenges in educational environments. The future members of society must be prepared to participate in the creation of new innovative solutions as well as to support the process of knowledge creation. Despite the fact that rapid development of technologies requires society to immediately respond, even under these circumstances society must be able to make meaningful decisions. These processes put on the forefront of competence have the ability to predict the unpredictable, which means that the educational environment must to a certain extent be able to predict what has not yet existed and cannot be verified. However, it must at the same time involve specialists from different fields who must deal with technologies and technological solutions that have not been tested or proven consistent in the long run, measure their impact and predict what services are up to date and what technologies and skills are required. This section examines the conditions for technology-enhanced learning (TEL) in a higher education (HE) context to understand what technologies and digital solutions have traditionally been used as well as the role of educators in driving TEL. The aim of the research is to conduct a pilot study to identify the most recent trends in the use of technologies in HE, identify the future research directions, predict the future directions of development and collect and analyse the obtained data.