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Definition: Game-based learning refers to an educational approach where games (digital or analogue) are used in order to engage students in interactive and immersive experiences designed to teach specific concepts, skills or subjects. Gamification refers to the application of game design elements, such as point systems, rewards, narratives, and competition, to non-game contexts. Game elements, mechanics and structures, when incorporated into the learning process, can enhance student understanding and increase engagement, motivation and retention of educational content. Teaching Biology can present challenges mainly due to the complexity of the subject matter, the different scales of biological organisation, and because it often includes challenging and counterintuitive concepts that may contradict students' preconceived notions. Integrating gaming into the high school Biology curriculum not only tackles the challenges of teaching complex concepts but can also promote student engagement. Customising gaming experiences to Biology intricacies enhances critical thinking and creates a dynamic learning environment tailored to the demands of high school biological education. This entry explores the integration of gaming and gamification in high school Biology education to overcome challenges in sustaining student interest. Additionally, the article highlights the diverse applications of games in education, showcasing their versatility in enriching the educational process. Future research should evaluate specific games, explore design principles, and consider challenges associated with implementation. In conclusion, using games in Biology education promises to enhance engagement, promote active learning, and deepen understanding, contributing to narrowing the gap in biological literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In compliance with national legislation, Greek tertiary education institutions assess educational quality often using a standardized anonymous questionnaire completed by students. This questionnaire aims to independently evaluate various course components, including content organization, instructor quality, facilities, infrastructure, and grading methods. Despite widespread use across universities, the questionnaire's validity remains unexamined. This study addresses this gap by analyzing 48,000+ questionnaire responses from the University of the Peloponnese (2014–2022), encompassing 68 undergraduate and graduate programs. Confirmatory factor analyses were used to assess the quality of the questionnaire, while exploratory factor analyses were used to assess the dimensions of the tool based on the data. Both analyses reveal shortcomings: confirmatory analysis detects strong correlations between supposedly different factors, and exploratory analysis identifies dimensions inconsistent with the expected structure. These findings question the questionnaire's quality and the validity of drawn conclusions, while additionally identifying opportunities for reducing the number of questions, which can contribute to increased questionnaire submission rates. Given its common use across Greek universities and its influence on shaping courses, urgent redesigning of the questionnaire for tertiary education evaluation is recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we present VaccineHero, an extended reality system that aims to reduce children's discomfort during vaccination. In our proposal, the child wears a headset during vaccination and watches a VR short story. The story includes a hero touching the child's arm, and the doctor synchronises the insertion of the needle with the VR content so that the child is efficiently distracted. A clinical trial has been carried out involving two doctors and a cohort of 16 children, which showed that the use of VaccineHero reduces children's discomfort during vaccination by a staggering 40% and completely eliminates extreme discomfort. The implemented solution is extremely affordable, as it can be deployed on simple headsets or even Cardboard devices, a feature that makes it a realistic option for any paediatric practice. It can also be extended to support other medical activities that involve needles, such as blood drawing and blood donation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital assistants—such as chatbots—facilitate the interaction between persons and machines and are increasingly used in web pages of enterprises and organizations. This paper presents a methodology for the creation of chatbots that offer access to museum information. The paper introduces an information model that is offered through the chatbot, which subsequently maps the museum's modeled information to structures of DialogFlow, Google's chatbot engine. Means for automating the chatbot generation process are also presented. The evaluation of the methodology is illustrated through the application of a real case, wherein we developed a chatbot for the Archaeological Museum of Tripolis, Greece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes a methodological approach that allows educational robotics to be used in order to develop collaboration skills in educational settings. Educational robotics is a promising educational tool that has the potential to become a platform for the development of a range of skills. However, there is a scarce amount of empirical case studies that present detailed information on the way it is implemented within formal primary school education. On the other hand, even though collaboration skills are considered vital for future school graduates, it is rarely discussed as the main focus of educational robotics. Most commonly collaboration or teamwork skills are viewed as a byproduct of the robotics activities. This work views collaboration skills as the main outcome. The methodological approach that this work proposes has been implemented during a period of three years in one pilot and two case studies. This research measures the reflection of the robotics tasks paired with the methodological approach to the development of collaboration skills. In order to measure the development of collaboration skills, the ATC21STM framework was used. The results showed activation of the indicators that comprise collaboration skills. Additionally, observations, which were gathered during unsupervised and unrelated to educational robotics, non-context-driven social interactions, showed improvements in students' social behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vaccination of children is a crucial tool to protect both individuals and the world in general from various diseases and pathogens. Unfortunately, the vaccination procedure is not a pleasant one for all children, with many experiencing various levels of discomfort, sometimes reaching intolerable levels. In the first part of this work, we develop VACS, a tool that measures the discomfort children experience during vaccination. VACS takes into consideration the complete timeline of the vaccination experience from the perspective of the child, starting from the moment the child enters the doctor's office through to their departure, and also the complete range of manifestations of discomfort, ranging from moaning and crying to facial expressions and posture. Their discomfort is quantified as a number from 0 to 25, with zero corresponding to a smooth vaccination and 25 to maximal/unbearable discomfort. In the second part of the work, we apply VACS to 40 vaccinations of children aged 2 to 12. Our findings show that approximately 40% of the children do not face discomfort during vaccination, but for the rest discomfort of varying degrees is observed. We also find that doctors are content with their patients facing considerably higher discomfort levels than what the children themselves are willing to withstand: doctors are content with VACS values up to 19 whilst children start to suffer when the VACS value exceeds 11. Surprisingly, characteristics such as (a) gender, (b) whether the state's recommended vaccination program has been implemented in full, and even (c) prior negative vaccination experiences are found to be poor predictors of vaccination discomfort. Age on the other hand may be a factor, with younger children experiencing discomfort more often and more intensely; more research is required in order to validate this with higher confidence. The formulation of VACS opens the door for more systematic work towards the mitigation of vaccination discomfort for children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is culture considered to be our past, our roots, ancient ruins, or an old piece of art? Culture is all the factors that define who we are, how we act and interact in our world, in our daily activities, in our personal and public relations, in our life. Culture is all the things we are not obliged to do. However, today, we live in a mixed environment, an environment that is a combination of "offline" and the online, digital world. In this mixed environment, it is technology that defines our behaviour, technology that unites people in a large world, that finally, defines a status of "monoculture". In this article, we examine the role of technology, and especially big data, in relation to the culture. We present the advances that led to paradigm shifts in the research area of cultural informatics, and forecast the future of culture as will be defined in this mixed world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work we present an updated version of "Safe University", a protocol aimed to ensure the safe operation of academic institutions during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The protocol is detailed, addressing all aspects of the actions that are required, ranging from controlled access to the university premises and tracking of immunity status to air quality provisions and organization of classes and teaching methods and more. A step-by-step guide and a sample timeline are included, to facilitate practical implementation. The protocol was first developed in the summer of 2021, when the Delta variant had first emerged but not yet dominated, with the aim to support the operation of Greek universities at the beginning of the 2021–2022 academic year. Since then, it has been updated to reflect the evolution of the virus and the pandemic, as well as the developments in the relevant scientific knowledge and additional monitoring, safeguarding and treatment tools that humanity now possesses. It has also been given a more generic form, making it suitable and adjustable for other countries and cultural/political environments as well as other respiratory viruses. With some additional adjustments, it can also be suitable to deal with epidemics from non-respiratory viruses that may arise in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are entering an era in which online personalities and personas will grow faster and faster. People are tending to use the Internet, and social media especially, more frequently and for a wider variety of purposes. In parallel, a number of cultural spaces have already decided to invest in marketing and message spreading through the web and the media. Growing their audience, or locating the appropriate group of people to share their information, remains a tedious task within the chaotic environment of the Internet. The investment is mainly financial—usually large—and directed to advertisements. Still, there is much space for research and investment in analytics that can provide evidence considering the spreading of the word and finding groups of people interested in specific information or trending topics and influencers. In this paper, we present a part of a national project that aims to perform an analysis of Twitter's trending topics. The main scope of the analysis is to provide a basic ordering on the topics based on their "importance". Based on this, we clarify how cultural institutions can benefit from such an analysis in order to empower their online presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities in Latin America commonly gather much more information about their students than allowed by data protection regulations in other parts of the world. We have tackled the question of whether abundant socio-economic data can be harnessed for the purpose of predicting academic outcomes and, thereby, taking proactive actions in student attention, course planning and resource management. A study was conducted to analyze the data gathered by a private university in Ecuador over more than 20 years, to normalize them and to parameterize a Multi-Layer Perceptron neural network, whose best-performing configuration would be used as a benchmark for the comparison of more recent and sophisticated Artificial Intelligence techniques. However, an extensive scan of hyperparameters for the perceptron—exploring more than 12,000 configurations—revealed no significant relationships between the input variables and the chosen metrics, suggesting that there is no gain from processing the extensive socio-economic data. This finding contradicts the expectations raised by previous works in the related literature and in some cases highlights important methodological flaws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intro: In this survey the academic performance of primary and secondary school students in Greece, for three consecutive school years, was examined. The data concerned all Greek students of the last two grades of elementary school and the three grades of junior high school. Method: Unsupervised learning methods such as an X-means algorithm in combination with descriptive and inductive statistical methods were used, in order to examine students' performance levels. The longitudinal stability of academic performance levels and the influence of demographic characteristics such as the region, gender and guardians' profession were also examined. Results: The existence of four levels of academic performance and longitudinal stability of frequencies per performance level was confirmed. There was also statistically significant differentiation based on the profession of guardian, gender, and area of residence. Discussion: The results demonstrated specific challenges that the educational policy of the country has to address. The stability of the percentages of students in the four groups of academic performance that emerged over time, shows corresponding stability in the factors that affect academic performance. A gradual reduction in the performance of students in high School was found, as the level of difficulty of the courses increases from class to class. Some demographic characteristics of students are not independent of their performance. However, due to the compliance with the general regulation of personal data, there was no access to additional features that may be related to performance, such as nationality and exact place of residence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]