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- Authoring game-based learning activities that are manageable by teachersPublication . Cardoso, Pedro; Morgado, Leonel; Coelho, AntónioThe great ambition of using games as the cornerstone of education is hindered by its associated teaching workload. The BEACONING project developed a framework based on an authoring tool for gamified lesson paths, which has been rolled-out in large scale across Europe. It includes stages for planning game-based educational activities, plus their deployment, monitoring, and assessment. Games are great tools for learning and as such many teachers wish to employ them in their teaching practices. Notwithstanding, using games in education is hard. It is hard to plan the time and the teachers’ tasks; the students’ activities; to keep track of what each student is doing; to assess and provide feedback, and so on – and all these obstacles encumber and limit educational adoption of games [1]. The BEACONING project [L1] acknowledges this and created the concept of a gamified lesson path [2], by linking game plots (the narrative and level design) provided by game development companies with educational activities within a triadic assessment model [3]. Using an authoring tool developed at INESC TEC (Figure 1), a learning designer creates a gamified lesson path by selecting a game plot, linking learning activities structured as missions and quests into it, and finally by associating those activities with specific learning goals and challenges (mini-games). Learning designers are either experts at creating educational content, within companies and organisations, or teachers with training in this area. By selecting a gamified lesson path, teachers can automatically deploy games to their students, adapting them to specific individual requirements. Not only students receive the games as part of educational activities from their teachers, but this deployment is also linked to the learning management platforms: teachers can track which students have not yet started learning within a gamified lesson plan, which ones are currently amidst it and where, and which students have finished it and how. Students can also track which teachers and courses have assigned them gamified lesson plans, and how they are progressing in each. All of this linking is done via anonymization, using the BEACONING platform as middleware, so that gaming companies can deploy games to individual students over the Web without actually knowing who each student is: individual details are kept within the learning management system and retrieved directly by the game on students’ smartphones, without being sent to the companies or even to the middleware. BEACONING provides each student’s game with information on the actual web call to retrieve information such as player names, but this transit of information occurs solely between the student’s smartphone and the school’s learning management system. By using BEACONING to track students’ progress, teachers can better manage their time and effort allocation when employing videogames in school, thus reducing their workload and empowering them to use these as a reliable and regular pedagogic approach “anytime and anywhere”. This authoring and deployment pipeline have now been successfully rolled out in large-scale testing across Europe (Figure 2) [L2]. BEACONING’s prototype and authoring pipeline approach holds the potential for application in many other non-traditional learning activities. Beyond gaming, we are exploring and expanding this approach to enable widespread deployment of active learning, location-based learning, immersive environments, outdoor activities, and more.
- InventiveTr@ining – Inven!RA architecture Activity Provider modules for online tracking of microelectronics studentPublication . Cota, Duarte; Cruzeiro, Tiago; Beck, Dennis; Coelho, António; Morgado, LeonelThe Inven!RA architecture is an approach for online tracking of progression towards learning objectives, from analytics of distributed learning activities, provided by multiple third parties. However, there are few examples on how to implement such third-party learning activities, known as Activity Provider modules. We followed the Inven!RA architecture interfacing specification to create and implement two sample learning activities: a technical documentation analysis activity and an Arduino microelectronics programming activity. Integration tests with an Inven!RA architecture prototype confirmed the adequacy of this implementation. Thus, these samples provide clarification on how to design and develop Inven!RA Activity Provider modules.
- Immersive authoring of virtual reality trainingPublication . Cassola, Fernando; Pinto, Manuel; Mendes, Daniel; Morgado, Leonel; Coelho, António; Paredes, HugoThe use of VR in industrial training contributes to reduce costs and risks, supporting more frequent and diversified use of experiential learning activities, an approach with proven results. In this work, we present an innovative immersive authoring tool for experiential learning in VR-based training. It enables a trainer to structure an entire VR training course in an immersive environment, defining its sub-components, models, tools, and settings, as well as specifying by demonstration the actions to be performed by trainees. The trainees performing the immersive training course have their actions recorded and matched to the ones specified by the trainer.
- A game as a tool for empirical research on the shamanic interface conceptPublication . Pinto, Tiago Susano; Coelho, António; Lukosch, Stephan; Morgado, LeonelA Shamanic Interface is a recent concept that posits that the acknowledgment of culture in gestural commands may contribute to richer and more powerful user interaction with abstract concepts and complexity, but has a lack of empirical validation. Hence, this paper presents a game developed as an empirical research tool for data collection and testing on shamanic interfaces. The game is a small maze where users use gestures to control a character to reach the end of each level. The control gestures performed by each user are captured with a Leap Motion controller and recognized through Hidden Markov Models. Three command sets were implemented: Portuguese cultural gestures, Dutch cultural gestures, and a generic set. This paper evaluates the game with different users to check its playability. We conclude that the game can be used as a research data-collection tool as is, but also acknowledge several playability-related improvement recommendations.
- Cities in Citizens’ HandsPublication . Morgado, Leonel; Rodrigues, Rui; Coelho, António; Magano, Olga; Calçada, Tânia; Cunha, Paula Trigueiros; Echave, Cynthia; Kordas, Olga; Sama, Sara; Oliver, Jennifer; Ang, Jim; Deravi, Farzin; Bento, Ricardo; Ramos, LuísWe propose a new paradigm for public participation in urban planning, a field which presents significant challenges for public understanding and participation. Our approach is based on leveraging the rich diversity of meaning associated with cultural gestures, traditions, folklore, and rituals, and using them in augmented reality systems, in order for citizens’ to explore, understand, and communicate the complex, systemic ideas and concepts associated with urban planning. At an immediate level, this approach holds the potential for enabling increased public awareness of what is at stake in urban planning - both on the part of citizens and on the part of public officials, policy-makers, and decision-makers – and consequently enhancing understanding and improving participation in public life and citizenship. It may also open up a new field of research and development in human-computer interaction, to leverage the richness of meaning and modes of expression which exist in various cultures and societies, rather than ignoring them and imposing dumbed-down or prescribed command methods. Thus, it aims to facilitate new levels of empowerment of users in the use of digital systems and data. The active utilization of cultural meaning in gestures, rituals, and social practices may also support and promote better inclusion and participation of minority groups and migrant communities in contemporary, technology-rich life.
- Preserving story choreographies across multiple platforms: an approach to platform-independent reuse of characters' behaviors for games, simulations, animations and interactive videosPublication . Lacet, Demetrius; Penicheiro, Filipe; Morgado, Leonel; Coelho, AntónioThis article presents an approach that allows the reuse of choreographies of digital stories, regardless of the platform for which they have been developed. Nowadays, story choreographies are linked to either game technology, simulations or interactive animations for which they have been implemented, so they become unavailable as these platforms become obsolete. This limits their reuse, because to perpetuate these digital stories requires new and repeated efforts and investments in its re-creation for new technological platforms that appear in substitution of the previous ones. We propose a methodology to safeguard the semantics of this "narrative choreographies" in an independent way, allowing them to be automatically adapted to new technological platforms when the original ones become obsolete.
- Shamanic interfaces for computers and gaming platformsPublication . Carvalho, Filipe; Morgado, Leonel; Coelho, AntónioNatural user interfaces are becoming widespread as a focus of research in human-computer interaction. Gestural interaction is an important part of this field, but generally done by mimicry. This raises concerns such as the necessity of creating abstractions for non-imitable commands and the difficulty of finding gestures that are meaningful for a worldwide audience. Cultural backgrounds impart different meanings to gestures. In this research , we explore the concept of allowing individuals to interact with computer systems using gesture from the individual’s own culture, focusing on a software engineering approach to support this idea. The aim is to leverage the rich semantics of non-mimicry cultural gestures to expand gestural interaction to support abstract commands for instructions that do not have a matching gestural imitation. This approach also holds the potential to support the learning of gestural commands, by linking them to the cultural background of each user. The proposed software engineering approach demonstrates the feasibility of planning applications with commands in mind, not specific gestures, separating concerns between gestural identification (which can include cultural background elements) and actual commands.
- A novel tool for immersive authoring of experiential learning in virtual realityPublication . Cassola, Fernando; Pinto, Manuel; Mendes, Daniel; Morgado, Leonel; Coelho, António; Paredes, HugoTraining in VR can reduce risks and costs while allowing frequent and diversified experiential learning activities. We present a novel VR immersive authoring tool for experiential learning courses with industrial machinery. A trainer can create a course from scratch, defining all its components (structure, models, tools, and settings). The actions which trainees should perform can be specified by demonstration. After completing the course, trainees’ actions will be matched against the trainer’s.
- Serious pervasive gamesPublication . Coelho, António; Rodrigues, Rui Manuel Gonçalves Calejo; Nóbrega, Rui; Jacob, João; Morgado, Leonel; Cardoso, Pedro; Van Zeller, Maria; Santos, Liliana; Sousa, A. AugustoSerious Pervasive Games extend themagic circle (Huizinga, 1938) to the players’ context and surrounding environment. The blend of both physical and fictive game worlds provides a push in player engagement and promotes situated learning approaches. Space and time, as well as social context, acquire a more meaningful impact on the gameplay. From pervasive learning towards science communication with location-based games, this article presents research and case studies that exemplify their benefits and related problems. Pervasive learning can be defined as “learning at the speed of need through formal, informal and social learning modalities” (Pontefract, 2013). The first case study—the BEACONING project—aims to contextualize the teaching and learning process, connecting it with problem-based game mechanics within STEM. The main goal of this project is to provide the missing connection between STEM subjects and real-world interactions and applications. The pedagogical foundation is supported on problem-based learning (PBL), in which active learning is in the center, and learners have to work with different tools and resources in order to solve problems (quests). Teachers create, facilitate, and assess pervasive and gamified learning activities (missions). Furthermore, these quests are gamified in order to provide non-linear game plots. In a second case study, we demonstrate and evaluate how natural heritage can benefit from pervasive games. This study is based on a set of location-based games for an existing natural park, which have been developed in order to provide enhanced experiences, as well as additional information about some species that are more difficult to observe or that are seasonal. Throughout the research and development of these projects, we have encountered and identified several problems, of different nature, present in pervasive games.
- Inven!RA Architecture for sustainable deployment of immersive learning environmentsPublication . Morgado, Leonel; Coelho, António; Beck, Dennis; Gütl, Christian; Cassola, Fernando; Baptista, Ricardo; Van Zeller, Maria; Pedrosa, Daniela; Cruzeiro, Tiago; Cota, Duarte; Grilo, Ricardo; Schlemmer, ElianeThe objective of this work was to support the sustainable deployment of immersive learning environments, which face varied obstacles, including the lack of support infrastructures for active learning pedagogies. Sustainability from the perspective of the integration of these environments in educational practice entails situational awareness, workload, and the informed assessment ability of participants, which must be supported for such activities to be employed in a widespread manner. We have approached this wicked problem using the Design Science Research paradigm and produced the Inven!RA software architecture. This novel result constitutes a solution for developing software platforms to enable the sustainable deployment of immersive learning environments. The Inven!RA architecture is presented alongside four demonstration scenarios employed in its evaluation, providing a means for the situational awareness of immersive learning activities in support of pedagogic decision making.
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