Search

During the last few years, there has been a growing interest in students getting engaged in digital game-making activities so as to enhance their thinking skills. The findings of studies that have examined the impact of such initiatives are quite positive, especially concerning the promotion of 21st century skills; however, many students seem to face difficulties in getting a deeper understanding of the game development life cycle. Additionally, students often have difficulties in meaningfully reusing and applying the concepts from various subjects, mainly mathematics and physics, into their game-making tasks or in understanding advanced programming commands while creating their games. The present study presents an innovative game-making teaching approach that suggests a series of steps for the systematic design and rapid development of motion-based touchless games, i.e., games that are based on natural user interaction technologies, like the Microsoft Kinect camera. Findings from evaluation studies in two (2) secondary schools indicate that this approach can increase student motivation, strengthen their computational thinking, enhance their understanding of geometric principles, and improve their social skills.

Serious games are used in the field of cultural heritage as a means to transmit cultural knowledge and enable an experiential contact with cultural content. The authors' aim is to investigate whether a game design exploiting the less used combination of complex storytelling, endogenous cooperation, and competition has the potential to sufficiently convey cultural content. More specifically, through four game interventions, it was investigated how a story-driven board game functions with teenage and adult users alike. A mixed research methodology was followed in all game sessions and data were collected through observation, semi-structured group interviews, and short questionnaires. Findings confirmed the playability of the suggested design and the potential to amuse players while providing learning gains and engagement with cultural content. Nevertheless, further evaluation in formal and non-formal educational settings is essential to validate our conclusions.

The unprecedented situation of COVID-19 which resulted in the closure of schools, enforced the educational community worldwide to find alternative ways to design the learning process. In special education the challenges are greater due to the need of individualized learning in 1:1 base, physical prompt, visual support and direct reinforcement. Nowadays, the internet services, like remote learning and teletherapy, could be an alternative and effective method of providing virtual intervention services using either well known video conferencing platforms, or more specialized ones. However, while such platforms hold great promise, there are few research studies that discuss the design decisions of the remote learning services and the most effective learning model that could be offered to children with Special Education Needs (SEN). The goal of this paper is to present a case study where SEN teachers and therapists applied a remote learning approach using an innovative online education gaming platform in combination with a video conferencing platform during the period of school closures due to COVID-19. Thirteen (13) children from three special schools participated in the study, with the majority having the autism diagnosis. The positive effects of this remote learning approach are discussed with the focus remaining on autism population.

In the last few years, engaging students to create digital games has been a pole of attraction for many teachers and researchers, resulting in highly positive learning experiences and promoting their thinking skills, e.g., programming and computational thinking (CT) skills. Researchers have already stated about the need for further research not only around the evaluation techniques and tools of the quality of these complex educational interventions, but mainly about ways to ease the assessment of students' performance from multiple perspectives with authenticity. This paper contributes to proposing a multifaceted assessment framework of the degree of students' acquisition of multiple skills, when they get involved in digital motion-based touchless game-making course-projects with the MIT Scratch tool. The results of its implementation during a pilot study with computer science undergraduate students, which are presented, highlight the positive effects of combining and extending various assessment techniques and tools to draw holistic conclusions about students' higher skills including computational and spatial thinking skills.

From an embodied learning perspective, the active human body can alter the function of the brain and therefore, the cognitive process. In this work, children's activity using motion-based technology is framed as an example of embodied learning. The present investigation focuses on the use of a series of Kinect-based educational games by 31 elementary students with special educational needs in mainstream schools, during a five-month intervention study. Results based on psychometric pre-post testing in conjunction with games-usage analytics, a student attitudinal scale, teachers' reflection notes and teacher interviews, demonstrated the positive impact of the games on children's short-term memory skills and emotional stage. Overall, the study improves our understanding of embodied learning via motion-based technology in teaching and learning with children with special educational needs.

Numerous research publications have mentioned the need to prepare teachers to design and enact technologically enhanced learning experiences for students, thus increasing their academic performance and their engagement when learning. This paper addresses the crucial issue of how to train pre-service and novice teachers effectively to become good designers of Moodle-based units of learning (UoLs), and to improve their critical thinking skills when engaging in peer-review sessions. A teacher training professional development approach for teachers that requires trainees to elicit, depict, reflect on, share design ideas, and co-create small UoLs in a Moodle learning management system is proposed. The training process follows the phases of the Think-Pair-Share learning strategy, and makes use of the features of the CADMOS graphic learning design editor that allows designers to see a preview of their unit of learning in Moodle. The findings of an evaluation study with 28 trainees showed that the proposed approach was easy to follow, and led to the creation of good-quality, re-usable designs for Moodle-based UoLs and enhanced trainees' design thinking skills. Transformations in the way in which the newly minted learning designers thought, acted, and reflected were observed.

Mobile technologies are integrated parts of our lives, and their use in educational settings could provide new, exciting opportunities for teaching and learning. The integration of the iPad in education, in particular, is thought to bring a paradigm shift and transform the twenty-first century classroom. However, as it is relatively new and experiences from pilot projects are just now beginning to surface, little concrete research on how it can be effectively adopted in the classroom and in other pedagogical activities exists. This raises the question of how to support students and teachers to realize the full potential of the 1:1 iPad approach. We followed the principles of action research in order to explore students', teachers' and parents perception of 1:1 iPad approach in the classroom. Towards this, we conducted a mixed-method research and combined quantitative and qualitative data. For the needs of this research, we employed a set of questionnaires, interviews and best practice lesson plans and performed descriptive and inferential statistical analysis. The results indicate that students are more positive with reference to the iPad being an excellent tool that helps them organize and understand the course. Our future work will embrace iPad's educational potential and emphasize on the design and implementation of orchestrated learning content.

Competency-based education represents an important priority for several countries worldwide. Although national governments and international education communities have identified a wide range of competencies as integral for meeting 21st century learning requirements there is a lack of evidence on how can these be effectively taught, learnt, and assessed in the classroom. A promising approach for competency-based education is "Out of Eden Learn", a research initiative of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education that incorporates several strategies such as thinking routines and dialogue tools that are carefully crafted to facilitate the development of core competencies among learners. This study looks at the "Skills Labs" competency-based educational reform in Greece and presents the process of using "Out of Eden Learn" to develop a curriculum that is both supportive of fostering the requisite competencies and responsive to the needs of primary teachers. A survey questionnaire was used to investigate the views of 120 teachers who piloted the curriculum in 82 kindergarten and elementary schools across Greece. The findings not only reveal the value of "Out of Eden Learn" approach for competency-based education, but they also indicate the interdisciplinarity and the transferability of its related strategies that can guide curriculum design and teaching practice in an array of international educational contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper gives an overview of CADMOS (CoursewAre Development Methodology for Open instructional Systems), a graphical IMS-LD Level A & B compliant learning design (LD) tool, which promotes the concept of "separation of concerns" during the design process, via the creation of two models: the conceptual model, which describes the learning activities and the corresponding learning resources, and the flow model, which describes the orchestration of these activities. According to the feedback from an evaluation case study with 36 participants, reported in this paper, CADMOS is a user-friendly tool that allows educational practitioners to design flows of learning activities using a layered approach. (Contains 3 tables and 2 figures.)

CADMOS is a graphical learning design (LD) authoring tool that helps a teacher design a unit of learning in two layers: (i) the conceptual layer, which seems like a concept map and contains the learning activities with their associated learning resources and (ii) the flow layer, which contains the orchestration of these activities. One of CADMOS' main innovative features is that it can bridge the gap between the design of a unit of learning and its enactment into Moodle. This paper presents how one can create a LD using CADMOS and deploy it into Moodle. Also, the paper shows the findings from a case study which was organized in order to evaluate the usability of the tool, its pedagogical flexibility and the usefulness of its innovative feature of deploying a LD into Moodle. CADMOS seems to be an easy-to-use tool, which offers guidance and flexibility during the design process. (Contains 2 tables and 6 figures.)

This study examines the effect of using an online 3D virtual environment in teaching Mathematics in Primary Education. In particular, it explores the extent to which student engagement--behavioral, affective and cognitive--is fostered by such tools in order to enhance collaborative learning. For the study we used a purpose-created 3D virtual environment and a macro-script incorporating learning tasks related to basic fractions. The study itself took place during four teaching sessions in a primary school classroom. The data collected and analyzed included chat logs, classroom observation notes and the results of pre- and post-tests. The findings indicate that the 3D virtual environment actively engages the students' interest and leads to richer interaction between them. This in turn results in a higher level of student engagement in the collaborative learning process. We believe that 3D virtual environments provide novel learning opportunities. However careful design is necessary in order to use their full potential. (Contains 7 tables and 8 figures.)

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of a proposed computer-based instructional method in Primary Education for self-regulated problem solving. The proposed instructional method is based on Sternberg's model of problem solving within an authentic context. It consists of three main phases: observation, collaboration and semi-structured guidance. The ultimate learning objective is to augment the autonomous problem-solving skills of primary school children. In our study the Synergo tool was used, which is a synchronous computer supported collaborative learning tool, as well as the Moodle learning management system. The context which frames the method is authentic, very close to a students' realistic learning situation. The findings of this study advocate that students can increase their problem-solving skills in a relatively short period of time. At the same time, they can improve their approach to the solution of a given mathematical problem, performing significant signs of autonomy. (Contains 2 tables and 5 figures.)

"Object-Oriented Programming" subject is included in the ACM Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate and Graduate Degree Programs in Computer Science as well as in Curriculum for K-12 Computer Science. In a few research studies learning problems and difficulties have been recorded, and therefore, specific pedagogical guidelines and educational tools have been proposed which aim at better supporting the instructional process of Object-Oriented Programming. This paper presents an empirical pilot study of a seminar related to the basic principles-concepts of Object-Oriented Programming. The seminar was at undergraduate educational level using the Java language and web technologies. Its instructional approach was based on selected best instructional practices (either in the form of guidelines or design patterns) already published in the literature. The fundamental aim of the present study was to investigate the factors that might affect the learning effectiveness of a web-enhanced instructional process of the Object-Oriented Programming subject. (Contains 4 tables and 6 figures.)

Design pattern creation, especially in the e-learning domain, is a highly complex process that has not been sufficiently studied and formalized. In this paper, we propose a systematic pattern development cycle, whose most important aspects focus on reverse engineering of existing systems in order to elicit features that are cross-validated through the use of appropriate, authentic scenarios. However, an iterative pattern process is proposed that takes advantage of multiple data sources, thus emphasizing a holistic view of the teaching - learning processes. The proposed schema of pattern mining has been extensively validated for Asynchronous Network Supported Collaborative Learning (ANSCL) systems, as well as for other types of tools in a variety of scenarios, with promising results. (Contains 3 figures.)

Educational Adaptive Hypermedia Applications (EAHA) provide personalized views on the learning content to individual learners. They also offer adaptive sequencing (navigation) over the learning content based on rules that stem from the user model requirements and the instructional strategies. EAHA are gaining the focus of the research community as a means of alleviating a number of user problems related to hypermedia. However, the difficulty and complexity of developing such applications and systems have been identified as possible reasons for the low diffusion of Adaptive Hypermedia in web-based education. Experience from traditional Software Engineering as well as Hypermedia Engineering suggests that a model-driven design approach is appropriate for developing applications where such requirements and constraints occur. This paper presents on a model-driven design process of EAHA. This process accords to the principles of hypermedia engineering and its innovation is the use of a formally specified object oriented design model. (Contains 7 figures.)

The role of conceptual modeling in Educational Adaptive Hypermedia Applications (EAHA) is especially important. A conceptual model of an educational application depicts the instructional solution that is implemented, containing information about concepts that must be ac-quired by learners, tasks in which learners must be involved and resources that will be used. The importance of such a model is multifold. It formally depicts the outcomes of instructional analysis, drives the development of actual applications and provides the information basis for automatic application generation in the context of Adaptive and Intelligent Tutoring Systems. In this paper we begin by describing a method for designing EAHA. Our method uses UML as the modeling language and defines the design process in three distinct steps. We propose an RDF encoding of the Conceptual Model, which is the outcome of the first step, following a specific RDF schema that is appropriate for such applications. This encoding can be obtained automatically and, in this way, a machine processable semantic description of the EAHA becomes available, as an outcome of the design process. In the resulting RDF-encoded Conceptual Model, we define rules of adaptation using the existing language RuleML. (Contains 8 figures.)

For a long time on-the-job training has been considered as the single point of contact of technical education with the real world job market. Indeed, traditional on-the-job training activities are of great educational value and complement uniquely any classroom-based learning activity. However, it has been observed that several obstacles arise when integrating on-the-job training with traditional learning and that new network-based tools can be used to improve the situation. Following this concept, in this paper we introduce a network-assisted educational structure for business simulation activities which can be considered as an alternative or a complement to on-the-job training activities in technical professional education. Business Simulation Activities are based on the execution of business scenarios in a controlled educational environment with support by network tools. A simulation of the real world business environment is created and virtual companies are established in order to participate in a virtual marketplace using network-based learning support and aiming to provide on-the-job experience without the shortcomings of traditional on-the-job training. An operational structure, network distribution, implementation issues, as well as some experience from a pilot implementation of the concept, are presented in this paper. (Contains 3 tables and 6 figures.)

Much is unknown about the effectiveness of networked technology in education. Although a great deal of research exists dealing with the effectiveness of various types of web-based learning systems, the focal question of most evaluation studies does not concern the innovation of the delivery model itself and the factors that contribute to its effectiveness. Moreover, there is a lack of a theoretical or conceptual framework in many existing studies. The authors applied a systematic evaluation method (called CADMOS-E), and present the quantitative and qualitative results of a re-evaluation study on the effectiveness of a web-based learning system used at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece, over a period of three years (1998, 1999, and 2000). The system supports an introductory course in software engineering offered by the Software Engineering Laboratory of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the NTUA. The findings were compared with the results from a study done in 1997. According to that study the "quality of the learning material" alone explained almost 28% of the system's effectiveness (R2adj.= 0.278). After its first evaluation the system underwent a number of revisions and additions suggested by the results from quantitative and qualitative analysis of students' feedback. In this article, among other things, the authors demonstrate--using quantitative results--that the changes made in the design and presentation of the learning material resources improved the learning effectiveness of the revised system, from 28% to 37.5%. (Contains 3 tables.)

Abstract In most evaluation studies, the question in focus concerns the comparative effectiveness of various types of web based learning systems to traditional ones rather than the innovation of the [...]

The authors present CADMOS, a methodology responding to the third and partially the fourth generation of instructional systems development. CADMOS splits instructional systems into the four subsystems of webware, specific infrastructure, human, and other learning resources.