As human actions continue to threaten wildlife, international organizations stress the importance of global environmental education.Teaching children about conservation is key to shaping their future behaviors.However, it is also important to create experiences that engage children with their local biodiversity while informing them about these issues.Seizing this opportunity, we designed, developed, and conducted a pilot study on an interactive, story-driven game with augmented reality (AR) to engage children aged 9 to 12 with local biodiversity and the impact of human actions on the environment.

Figure 1: The tapestry employed a user-centred approach in its design and implementation.We developed the visuals and crafted elements to support the narrative plot about marine noise pollution.The experience also incorporates tangible interfaces, audio and sensors to engage the users and sensitise them to this topic.

Periodic Fable in the Wild is a gamified experience that aims to contextualise basic concepts about the Periodic Table and organic chemistry through Augmented Reality, gamification and mechanisms that integrate real-world compounds/objects within the system. The app uses a pedagogical situated learning approach allowing preteens (9 to 13 year-old) to explore physical spaces, gather atoms, and recreate chemical compounds while interacting with molecular structures. By adapting the learning content to the user’s real-world context, we aim to enhance knowledge transfer, making the experience more meaningful, relatable, and engaging.

This pictorial presents Periodic Fable (PF), an educational game's design and graphic interface that promotes a constructivist approach to engage young children with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) subjects. The game presents children with scientific content supported with an exploratory activity using physical cubes manipulable through Tangible Interaction and Augmented Reality. The game's objective is to entertain children while engaging them with the basics of chemistry and the Periodic Table. We reflect upon the combination of these immersive technologies, game-play mechanics, and aesthetics geared towards conveying accurate scientific information through a ludic and entertaining approach. The quantitative and qualitative results of a study with 20 children, showed significant positive results in the participants’ learning outcomes and engagement, thereby encouraging us to continue evaluating our design system as a tool that can promote STEM Education.

Children often perceive abstract concepts such as chemistry as difficult, and teachers struggle to convey content knowledge in these subjects. In this pictorial, we address the need to promote the interest for chemistry in children by developing a multi-layered Augmented Reality serious game that uses storytelling, character design and game mechanics to connect and engage young audiences with chemistry: the Periodic Fable an Augmented Journey. Our contribution relies on the design and development of the system to convey content knowledge about the Periodic Table while fostering the children's interest and challenging their possible daunting perception of the domain. After designing and implementing the game, we conducted an exploratory study using a mixed-method approach engaging 21 young participants from a public school to assess the learning gains and the role of storytelling through levels of narrative transportation. The results show positive perception and learning outcome of chemistry, narrative transportation showcasing an opportunity for a unique form to approach chemistry using an edutainment format.

This paper investigates whether location and medium affect the experience of interactive storytelling in the context of mobile Virtual Reality systems. For this purpose, we discuss the development of Fragments of Laura, a location-aware multimedia application in a larger interactive transmedia story, where users can view a 360° narrative in a 3D environment. We conducted a user study with the intention of measuring Presence, Flow and Narrative Transportation and evaluate four scenarios resulting from the combination of two independent variables - location (existence and absence of links between the test location and the narrative location) and medium (tablet and mobile virtual reality with smartphones). Our results show that the user experience while watching a narrative fluctuates depending on the location where is viewed and the device in which is viewed. Locations linked with the content lead to a significantly increased Flow, Presence, and Narrative Transportation.