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Imagine parents not asking their children “Did you study today?” but instead asking “Did you play today? If you didn't, please go and start playing right now!”. This is the general revolutionary idea of game-based learning. This is the ideal experience for every child, to learn by playing, and for parents to see their children loving to learn as they love to play, and finally for teachers to receive major excitement from their students about learning. If serious games are applied in lessons, then teachers stop going to their classrooms telling their students the theoretical part of their lesson and then solve exercises on repeat; Instead they could go to their classroom and say to their students that “today is a special day, as you will get to solve some great riddles in order to escape from Dr. Tom Cat's lab”. This paper will discuss how game-based learning and especially escape rooms could be a great learning toolkit for teachers and how these games can foster motivation and help students achieve their educational goals. The paper will describe the story of Dr. Tom Cat, a (great and maybe a little mad) scientist that has a special lab where each room is dedicated to one of the greatest scientists in Mathematics, Physics and Informatics like Alan Turing, Ada Lovelace, Kurt Gödel and Grace Hopper. This way, students learn about these very important scientists' lives, but also, they are required to solve a similar riddle to the problems each scientist had to tackle in their respective lives. Finally, the paper will present how an Augmented Reality application has brought this story and escape room game to life, and how this application helped impress the students more and store learning analytics about which riddle was solved by whom. The results of this experimental launch will be finally presented and analyzed.

The article is devoted to modes of designing advertisements in China. The author proposes two hypotheses. According to the first one, instrumental values influence modes of advertisement design in a particular country. According to the second one, developing relationships (guanxi) is a key instrumental value that determines rhetoric of advertising in China and spreads its impact on all its constituents: choice of referent, goals, modes of depicting target audience, patterns of reasoning, and typical set of expressive means. To test hypotheses we used content-analysis of outdoor advertisements in China, Russia, and Kazakhstan. The results of the content-analysis proved that developing relationships with consumers is a key goal of advertising in China. This goal determines the choice of the company as a referent. Social roles of advertising characters are a major descriptor of the target audience. The company’s status, its experience, and financial position are key motives that influence patterns of reasoning. Chinese advertising is also characterized by use of positive-colored vocabulary, traditional symbols and attributes of happiness, “holiday” syntax, appeals to harmony with nature and fellow men. The results of research are complex, have scientific novelty and can be used by foreign companies while developing advertisements, targeted at the Chinese consumer.

A concept of educational game for learning programming languages is presented. The idea of learning programming languages and improving programming skills through programming game characters’ behavior is described. The learning course description rules for using in games are suggested. The concept is implemented in a game for learning C# programming language. A common game architecture is modified for using in the educational game. The game engine is built on the base of the graphical engine Ogre3D and extended with game logic. The game has been developed as an industry level commercial product and is planned for sale to educational institutions.