In this paper we propose the use of a shared social context to facilitate agent perception of social dynamics within a virtual environment. We argue that through a shared context it can be more feasible to equip agents with social behaviors and reasoning rules for social intelligence, better suited for real-time constrained serious games with multiple agents.

Students who are learning to program often have difficulties understanding cognitively complex concepts. Teaching programming is mainly focused on the syntax and features of programs, rather than to a deeper understanding of programming constructs and abstract concepts. Computer game stimulates active learning and presentation of learning content in a variety of contexts that are funny and enga...

In this paper, we are focusing on digital serious games (edugames) and how they can be utilized in teaching in the ethics and citizenship domain. Our aim is to combine narrative techniques with intelligent tutoring techniques in a single model that adopts and based on educational theories and classroom educational strategies. The model has been used to implement an adaptive educational interact...

Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) systems aim to teach a language providing technology and motivation to the user. They allow us to implement pedagogical content, motivational techniques and corrective feedback. On this basis, we present Medieval Adventure, which is a CALL system that aims to teach Portuguese’s basic levels to adults. Medieval Adventure teaches a second language mainly...

Voluntariness is an important feature of games. Serious game designers intend to generate engaging gameplay, which implies that voluntary play should be equally important for serious games as for entertainment games. This paper describes the outcome of a study on the impact of voluntariness on learning in a serious game. The results of 19 participants, randomly assigned to voluntary and mandato...

This paper describes a game application designed for care homes, hospitals and the civil protection and dealing with the topic “complex dialogues” in the frame of the MIRROR project. This project aims to empower and engage employees to reflect on past work performances and personal learning experiences in order to learn in “real-time” and to creatively solve pressing problems immediately. The d...

Intelligent environments and smart applications require creating engaging interactions with their users, which on one side requires sensing and understanding human behavior, and on the other side carefully engineered application interfaces to keep these interactions sustained and useful over longer periods. Playful interactions and serious games incorporate elements of play for this purpose. As...

A key factor for the success and efficacy of an educational medium is the extent to which it is capable of addressing the preferences, abilities, strengths, weaknesses, and goals of individual learners. Research in the field of learning and instruction has demonstrated in the past that one on one tutoring is the most effective and powerful way of teaching. Ever since, the research community att...

Game-based approaches to learning are increasingly being recognized as having the potential to stimulate intrinsic motivation amongst learners. Whilst a range of examples of effective serious games exist, creating the highfidelity content with which to populate a serious game is resource-intensive task. To reduce this resource requirement, research is increasingly exploring means to reuse and r...

Program developers and researchers in the sexual health domain have increasingly embraced technological trends as they emerge. With the emergence of serious game applications to impact health behaviors, a natural step for research enquiry will be the investigation of serious games for sexual health education. We invited a panel of sexual health researchers who are working at the intersection of...