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Current information and communication technology (ICT) has the potential to bring further changes to education. New learning techniques must be identified to take advantage of recent technological tools, such as smartphones, multimodal interfaces, multi-touch displays, etc. Game-based techniques that capitalize on ICT have proven to be very valuable. This paper presents a study aimed at validating a new educational format, inspired by the Discovery Learning technique, which integrates educational games, designed to be played on large multi-touch displays, with other types of formal and informal learning. Six classes of a primary school were involved in the study. The results showed that the proposed educational format is effective and that games on these novel multi-touch systems engage pupils very much, stimulate their collaboration and help consolidating knowledge.

Distance education has experienced profound changes due to the introduction of new technologies, especially mobile devices of different types. It is necessary to define new learning techniques which are able to capture students' attention and to engage them in their learning activities, reducing problems like distraction generated by the use of the device itself and/or by the surrounding environment. Game-based learning is a valuable possibility. The excursion-game has been recently proposed to support pupils learning history during visits to historical sites; its goal is to make the visit and the overall experience of cultural heritage more engaging. This paper describes the approach followed in the design of the system implementing the excursion-game; it takes into account an end-user development perspective in order to allow domain experts, i.e., experts in history and cultural heritage, contributing to design excursion-games for a wide set of historical sites. (Contains 11 figures.)

Quality of e-learning systems is one of the important topics that the researchers are investigating in the last years. This paper refines the concept of quality of e-learning systems and proposes a new framework, called TICS (Technology, Interaction, Content, Services), which focuses on the most important aspects to be considered when designing or evaluating an e-learning system. Our proposal emphasizes user-system interaction as one of such important aspects. Guidelines that address the TICS aspects and an evaluation methodology, called eLSE (e-Learning Systematic Evaluation) have been derived. eLSE methodology combines a specific inspection technique with user-testing. This inspection, called AT inspection, uses evaluation patterns, called Abstract Tasks (ATs), that precisely describe the activities to be performed during inspection. The results of an empirical validation of the AT inspection technique, carried out to validate this technique, have shown an advantage of the AT inspection over the other two usability evaluation methods, demonstrating that Abstract Tasks are effective and efficient tools to drive evaluators and improve their performance. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

The article provides information on the M-Learning Game at Archaeological Parks in Southern Italy. It states that M-Learning is a combination of e-learning and mobile technologies designed to capture the nature of e-learning by providing users with independence from the constraints of time and location. It notes the three main phases of the game carried out by the Explore! It mentions that the user experience with an interactive system depends on system's characteristics, needs, and motivations. It also notes the importance and practical advantage of Explore!