With the ever-growing number of choices of educational software for children scholastic programs, the task of choosing software can be a nerve-wracking one. As computer use becomes more substantial in home and classroom learning, the selection of software endeavors even more importance. The key aspects for providing a better learning experience lies in choosing software that successfully combin...

YouTube is one of the world’s most popular web sites and hosts numerous amateur and professional videos. Comments on these videos may be researched to give insights into audience reactions to important issues or particular videos. Yet little is known about YouTube discussions in general: how frequent they are, who typically participates and the role of sentiment. This article fills this gap thr...

This paper analyses existing gamification approaches to build a mapping between game genres and potential human skills required by and potentially trained by the specific genres. This mapping is then applied during an expert review of two typical game scenarios: an action-and reaction-oriented mini game and a collaborative group raid implemented in World of Warcraft. Both scenarios undergo an i...

The paper describes an early research related to the design, development and evaluation of a concept of flexible and physical components to manipulate conceptual structures. The concept exploits the affordances of physical objects in creating tangible media for collaborative and distributed edutainment spaces. A set of basic I-BLOCKS with individual processing and communication power was develo...

The U-CREATE project aims at efficient content creation for new technologies, in particular interactive setups, Mixed Reality experiences and location-based services. A graphical authoring tool is developed to allow one to create elaborated contents in a fast and easy way. The present paper introduces the tool and elaborates on its main components, which allow the user to author an interactive ...

The social basis for learning, particularly in childhood, has been acknowledged since the seminal research of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Although his theory is very often cited in HCI literature as a theoretical basis for the design of multi-user interactive artefacts, little empirical data is available that assess Vygotsky’s thesis in this domain. This paper presents an empirical s...

The battle between educators and entertainers continue when it comes to gaming. While this is so, the edutainment battleground has expanded to include actors outside formal schooling agencies, namely International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs). These actors employ digital games with the aim to educate and activate towards specific social causes. These serious games are viewed to have t...

—This paper presents an analysis of how and why a new generation of virtual reality peripherals affect virtual reality in general, and its uses for education in particular. We describe a method to bring psychological principles, such as positive learning and cognitive dynamics into the best utilization of VR in the classroom and present the technique of emotional modulation aimed to help studen...

This paper is a report on the initial findings of a study conducted in the project FunTain with the main purpose to find general guidelines for edutainment games. This to guide designers of such games, as they often lack in design guidelines. Usability evaluations were conducted on the edutainment game in order to find usability problems. These findings were then analyzed and used as input in f...