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Recycling has grown to be extremely relevant for the maintenance of our planet, but also for our well-being. Sustainability is a key issue in modern societies, relying on intergenerational care and education to promote recycling habits and social responsibility. Raising awareness towards recycling and healthy environmental habits, and motivating people to become more responsible about sustainability and the environment might be achieved through a game, designed to be simple and intuitive and to enhance the learning process. Eco Tetris is a game, designed to teach about the importance of recycling. Based on the well-known Tetris game, Eco Tetris builds upon this by adding card collecting mechanics and integrating the game with the real world via geo-referencing, beacons, and augmented reality experiences. The main goal of this game is to raise awareness and make the players more conscious of their environmental decisions and habits, while also being entertained. Our primary focus is the older generation, for whom the game is kept simple, in terms of both usability and design. Eco Tetris is a game whose main concern is to transmit knowledge on how to recycle and its importance for our planet. In this game, players are challenged to place the garbage in the right recycling bin. The mechanic is virtually the same as when recycling. Our goal is to imbue the player with recycling habits. The core gameplay loop will have the player doing the sorting exercise - separating garbage in-game, mentally associating it to its right colors. The bridge between the in-game and real-world is achieved via geo-reference modules and beacons. When visiting an eco-point, the player will have access to additional content, like an augmented reality experience, that provides positive reinforcement and knowledge about players' actions and the environment in general. We expect this game to promote ecological responsibility and a major view of one's role in the recycling process. The game is developed towards the enhancement of decision-making, memory skills, awareness, responsibility, and learning of its players. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collaborative virtual worlds can be used to achieve different purposes according to the intended use. The design of 3D collaborative virtual environments for learning has been an important research field for several years. However, the research in this specific field has shown that in most of the cases, the environments do not have appropriate technical characteristics. The design of the educational collaborative virtual environments goal is to produce environments that encourage users to achieve effective learning. In this sense, the current study presents a design model for development of 3D Educational Collaborative Virtual Environments. This model is based on the engineering software techniques and methods. It is supported by a spiral cycle that allows us to develop applications. The process is divided into a set of activities that are being carried out throughout each cycle, producing several work products, with the aim to provide each team member a set of guidelines and tools necessary for to make intelligent decisions about what they do. The model is composed by five steps, namely: Conception, Analysis, Design, Implementation and Evaluation. Each step contains a set of diagrams to support the developer team in their tasks. With this model, the applications are developed in a series of incremental releases, that is, the final system is constructed, based on the refined prototype. These steps include activities that enable to quantify the quality of Educational Collaborative Virtual Environments (ECVE). It is based on the Quantitative Evaluation Framework developed by Escudeiro (Escudeiro, 2007) and allow us to have a degree of freedom in the selection of quality criteria. Thus, we can obtain a single quantitative value of quality for any domain in analysis, i.e., we can adapt it in any domain and valence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Promoting equal opportunities and social inclusion for people with disabilities is a concern of modern societies and the European Education Area. However, despite the evolution of science and the availability of new technologies to find solutions to combat this problem, there is still a great difficulty in communication with these communities in their daily life and in different environments in which they are inserted. The educational environment is not currently prepared for these communities, which is a problem, since education has a great impact on the lives of all citizens and the existence of barriers limits future opportunities. The use of serious games in an educational environment stimulates learning and critical thinking, but despite the relevance of serious games regarding communication and social inclusion, from the information gathering we concluded that there are no large array of games and tools that facilitate its creation and are accessible to people with disabilities. In this article we will discuss and present the architecture and the development of the platform that aims to improve social inclusion and access to education for deaf and blind people. For this purpose, we will provide tools which enable these communities to participate in the creation of educational games and also playing along with all other users of the platform, in order to overcome the communication difficulties and barrier faced by these communities in their daily life, especially in the educational environment. The platform developed will allow the creation of educational games, of the genre Quiz with the possibility of integrating iBeacon technology, quickly and simply, by any and for any type of users. Both the platform and the resulting games will have input and output mechanisms that will allow the inclusion of users with disabilities, such as voice synthesis, Virtual Sign (two-way sign language translator) and voice command control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem-based learning (PBL) is a learner-centered pedagogy in which students are assessed on their ability to go through a problem solving process. Engineering is one of the areas where PBL is a valid learning alternative/complement to the traditional methods. An engineer is a professional practitioner, concerned with applying scientific knowledge and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical problems. The responsibilities of the engineer may include defining problems, analyzing criteria, finding and analyzing solutions, and making decisions. Engineers must weigh different design choices on their merits and choose the solution that best matches the requirements. Therefore PBL clearly allows developing the skills and competences that are expected in an Engineer. In a convergent path, games and simulations can be instantiated for learning as they involve mental and physical stimulation and develop practical skills – they force the player to decide, to choose, to define priorities, to solve problems, etc. Games can easily provide a PBL environment if the correct challenges are given to the players. The objective of the eCity game is to provide a PBL-based educational platform, based on an opensource city-building simulator/game (Simcity like) and explore its simulation engine to support city development problems that relate to math, science and engineering concepts. This platform will be used for two different purposes: to motivate secondary students to an engineering academic path and to scaffold learning for higher education engineering students. And this will happen simultaneously as students from both education levels will form heterogeneous groups where the older students can guide the younger ones in the finding of the correct solution. The challenges and problems listed in the (virtual) city are based on real life situations and the learners' solutions exploited in the resolution or improvement of those situations can then be based on their experience from the real world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is very important to develop intercultural skills and inter-communication of SME managers, who intend to internationalize their companies, this way facilitating employability and European competitiveness. Serious Games are especially useful for this training because they offer immersive and engaging environment where users 'learn by doing'. This trial and error based approach supports well learning and is able also to improve teamwork, social skills, leadership and collaboration. This article presents a serious game that fosters the improvement of internationalization and language skills of SME managers. The GLOBALL Manager game is meant as a tool to support those users that want to take their companies into an international dimension. Initial tests have been promising with encouraging results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collaborative virtual worlds can be used to achieve different purposes according to the intended use. The design of 3D collaborative virtual environments for learning has been an important research field for several years. However, the research in this specific field has shown that in most of the cases, the environments do not have appropriate technical characteristics. The design of the educational collaborative virtual environments goal is to produce environments that encourage users to achieve effective learning. In this sense, the current study presents a design model for development of 3D Educational Collaborative Virtual Environments. This model is based on the engineering software techniques and methods. It is supported by a spiral cycle that allows us to develop applications. The process is divided into a set of activities that are being carried out throughout each cycle, producing several work products, with the aim to provide each team member a set of guidelines and tools necessary for to make intelligent decisions about what they do. The model is composed by five steps, namely: Conception, Analysis, Design, Implementation and Evaluation. Each step contains a set of diagrams to support the developer team in their tasks. With this model, the applications are developed in a series of incremental releases, that is, the final system is constructed, based on the refined prototype. These steps include activities that enable to quantify the quality of Educational Collaborative Virtual Environments (ECVE). It is based on the Quantitative Evaluation Framework developed by Escudeiro (Escudeiro, 2007) and allow us to have a degree of freedom in the selection of quality criteria. Thus, we can obtain a single quantitative value of quality for any domain in analysis, i.e., we can adapt it in any domain and valence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collaborative virtual worlds can be used to achieve different purposes according to the intended use. The design of 3D collaborative virtual environments for learning has been an important research field for several years. However, the research in this specific field has shown that in most of the cases, the environments do not have appropriate technical characteristics. The design of the educational collaborative virtual environments goal is to produce environments that encourage users to achieve effective learning. In this sense, the current study presents a design model for development of 3D Educational Collaborative Virtual Environments. This model is based on the engineering software techniques and methods. It is supported by a spiral cycle that allows us to develop applications. The process is divided into a set of activities that are being carried out throughout each cycle, producing several work products, with the aim to provide each team member a set of guidelines and tools necessary for to make intelligent decisions about what they do. The model is composed by five steps, namely: Conception, Analysis, Design, Implementation and Evaluation. Each step contains a set of diagrams to support the developer team in their tasks. With this model, the applications are developed in a series of incremental releases, that is, the final system is constructed, based on the refined prototype. These steps include activities that enable to quantify the quality of Educational Collaborative Virtual Environments (ECVE). It is based on the Quantitative Evaluation Framework developed by Escudeiro (Escudeiro, 2007) and allow us to have a degree of freedom in the selection of quality criteria. Thus, we can obtain a single quantitative value of quality for any domain in analysis, i.e., we can adapt it in any domain and valence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]