In the digital age, chatbots are widely applied in education. chatbots have become prevalent in education, proving to enhance learning outcomes. However, Students often face challenges in time and task management, which simultaneously test their ability to continue learning and cope with setbacks. To address this, we developed a "Learning Butler" chatbot system. incorporating the GPT language model and prompt engineering to support students' task and schedule management. This system fosters grit and a growth mindset through interactive dialogues, boosting their perseverance and adaptability in the face of challenges. thereby enhancing learning outcomes. Experiment results show significant improvements in students' grit, growth mindset and overall learning outcomes. Furthermore, surveys and web usage records also indicate the chatbot's beneficial impact on education.

In the realm of digital education, traditional virtual reality setups often confine students to basic interactions through devices like a mouse and handheld controllers, limiting immersive learning opportunities, particularly in disciplines requiring multi- modal knowledge such as hospitality and teacher training. Multi-modal knowledge encompasses physical actions, gestures, facial expressions, and other non-verbal communication. This study investigates a novel educational approach that synchronizes physical settings with digital reality scenarios, aided by Al Stereo Cameras (e.g., Apple Vision Pro or MetaQuest), to create a more interactive learning experience. A three-group quasi-experimental design involved 103 Taiwanese students practicing hospitality tasks, such as table service in a simulated Japanese restaurant. The groups included: Group A, handling physical utensils in a real-world-like setting; Group B, controlling virtual utensils with a mouse; and a control group, learning through conventional teaching. Findings reveal that Group A reported significantly better learning outcomes and reduced cognitive load compared to Groups B and C. The reduced cognitive load was attributed to the use of real physical utensils, which minimized the need for students to learn how to navigate virtual utensils using a mouse. The findings underscore the benefits of incorporating physical objects into VR environments, bridging the gap between traditional and digital educational modalities. This approach offers a practical framework for situated learning in educational settings, incorporating embodied and multi-modal learning, and suggesting its broad applicability in improving educational practices and outcomes in the digital age.

In service-oriented disciplines such as Hospitality Management Education and Nursing Education, multimodal elements such as bodily movements and facial expressions play crucial roles in addition to learning through oral instruction and written materials. Current digital reality learning systems provide excellent spaces for situated learning and real-time assessment. However, they often lack an environment that simultaneously considers real-time assessments of physical actions and spatial awareness. This omission can prevent students from effectively applying their learned knowledge in real professional settings, thereby reducing the practicality and effectiveness of their learning. To address this issue, our study has developed a teaching assistance system aimed at enhancing learners' experiences through readily available technologies. We established a new learning environment and model that can be used in the classroom, incorporating the concepts of personas and spatial computation proposed by Apple Vision Pro to facilitate real-time assessment and scaffolded guidance in service-oriented learning. This model, which complements traditional learning methods, supports embodied cognition and situated learning, allowing users to interact simultaneously with the physical environment and digital reality. Students can engage in both language and embodied action exercises within this environment. Through the system's real-time evaluation and feedback, students can immediately reflect and adjust their behavior in a nearly real interaction setting, enhancing their practical experience and thus improving their ability to absorb and apply learned skills. Moreover, students' performances in the digital reality are displayed on a large screen in the classroom, allowing peers in the audience area to simultaneously observe each other's acts, thereby creating a theater-style learning environment. This transformation not only allows students to see their own and others' real-time performances but also shifts their role from mere participants to performers. This shift helps build a sense of responsibility and enhances their motivation to learn. This method was tested in the 'Hospitality Practices and Japanese' course at a university of technology, with results showing significant improvements in learning outcomes in practical courses that require physical and verbal interactions compared to traditional digital realities.

This study explores the impact of digital magic mirrors on student engagement and skill development in vocational education, specifically in the hospitality sector. Traditional classroom-based instruction often fails to connect theoretical knowledge with practical application, leading to insufficient preparation for industry demands. To address this, the research integrates a digital magic mirror into a digital theater room to enhance learning through immersive experiences. A quasi- experimental design involved 60 hospitality students divided into an experimental group using the digital magic mirror and a control group using a general digital learning approach. Learning achievement, engagement, and self-efficacy were measured through pre- and post-tests and a questionnaire. Results showed that the experimental group had significantly higher learning achievement compared to the control group. The digital magic mirror also improved student engagement and skill development. However, no significant differences were found in perceived learning motivation and self-efficacy, with both groups reporting positive experiences. These findings suggest that digital magic mirrors effectively bridge the theory-practice gap in vocational education by providing dynamic learning environments. The study concludes that the proposed digital magic mirror approach can significantly enhance student outcomes and recommends further research on their long-term impacts and broader applicability.

Educational robotics research endeavors to develop companion robots that can engage students in learning activities. However, existing educational robots are not always well-suited for use outside of the classroom and may struggle to sustain compelling interactions. To address this, this study proposes a new model for educational robots that leverages interdependence theory, which explains how mutual dependence can lead to lasting relationships. The pet-owner dynamic, in which the pet relies on the care and attention of the owner and provides emotional support in return, served as inspiration for this model. The proposed model features a digital pet-like robot that students must train and empower to perform a drama presenting their final learning results in front of the class. In an experiment with 60 students in a Japanese Hospitality course in Taiwan, the study found that long-term relationships between students and pet-like robots emerged, and these relationships significantly improved learning performance compared to ordinary robots. This study highlights the potential of integrating interdependence theory with advanced technologies such as robots, mobile devices, and virtual reality to enhance student learning and foster long-term relationships between students and robots.

This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of embodied learning (EL) approaches in classrooms to improve students' learning effectiveness. A drama-based learning strategy was used to investigate the gap in creating an authentic learning environment for classroom learners and facilitating them to be situationally embodied in the learning context and perform hands-on activities. A total of 76 undergraduate-level students were randomly selected for either the experimental group ($\mathrm{n}=31$) or the control group ($\mathrm{n}=44$). The experimental group used the learning system to immerse and situationally embodied in a drama-based virtual scenario for EL activities where real-time speech, objects and images, body motion and gesture recognition techniques were provided to them as self-evaluation techniques while performing, and the control group used immersion technologies to situationally embody in a virtual fictional context and the teacher and peers did evaluation after the activity. Results showed an improvement in learning effectiveness for both groups, but the approach used for the experimental group outperformed the control group. This study impacts that EL approaches focusing on situatedness can enhance learning effectiveness and provide a useful guide for educational practitioners. Educators can facilitate the effective transfer of knowledge and skills to learners through engaging and immersive learning experiences.

This study investigates the effectiveness of a simultaneous multi-situational learning system with embodied recognition to enhance learners' outcomes. Traditional situational learning systems provide a single situation for knowledge explanation or application, which limits learners' ability to fully immerse themselves in the learning environment and receive immediate feedback. To address this, a simultaneous multi-situational learning system was proposed to create a digital space with multiple situations, allowing learners to immerse themselves in different scenarios simultaneously and facilitating reflective learning. An experimental study with 60 undergraduate students in a Hospitality Japanese course compared a control group using the traditional situational learning system with an experimental group using the proposed simultaneous multi-situational learning system. Results showed the proposed system significantly improved learning outcomes, understanding, and interest in learning. It enables the prompt creation of situational learning environments, contextualizes knowledge, and fosters reflective learning with real-time feedback. Overall, this study contributes to the field of education by providing a more effective approach to situational learning that can be easily implemented in classroom settings.

Educational robots have shown promise in enhancing learning performance; but, many of these robots function solely as companions or tutors and rely on novelty to attract attention, making it challenging to maintain long-term relationships. Although pet robots have been utilized to create relationships with users, their potential in education remains underexplored. This study addresses this issue by designing a robot as a pet, applying the interdependence theory to establish lasting relationships and improve learning performance. The interdependence theory suggests that relationships between individuals can be strengthened through mutual dependence and the fulfillment of each other's needs. In this study, learners were prompted to engage in continuous care for their pet robots, receiving emotional reinforcement from them seamlessly across both virtual and tangible forms enabled by the ChatGPT API. To culminate their learning process, learners presented their ultimate learning outcomes alongside their pet robots, enacting situational dramas for their classmates. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, a quasi-experiment was conducted with 100 undergraduate learners enrolled in a Japanese for Hospitality and Tourism course in Taiwan. Results indicate that robots designed as pets, leveraging interdependence theory, significantly yield positive effects on learners, encompassing improved learning outcomes, extended interaction rates, and heightened satisfaction with their study journey compared to conventional robots. The study concludes by discussing research limitations and offering suggestions for further enhancements to this approach.

This study aims to address the limitation of existing chatbots in education, which are designed only for learners and do not account for the needs of instructors. To solve this problem, the study proposes a learning chatbot called the "Learning Butler," which integrates resources for optimal learning outcomes and is developed based on the situational theory for mobile and classroom learning environments. The effectiveness of the Learning Butler in improving learning outcomes was evaluated through an experiment conducted at a university of science and technology. The results demonstrated that the Learning Butler significantly improved learners' performance compared to the general chatbot, and learners and instructors provided positive feedback on its ability to offer instant suggestions and feedback during dialogues and interactions. This research contributes to the development of effective educational technology by exploring the potential of chatbots in enhancing learning outcomes, with the ultimate goal of improving the quality of education through the application of advanced technologies and innovative pedagogical approaches.

Nowadays, most programming languages support multiple programming paradigms, enabling the choices between them for different application scenarios and even using them together, for example, object-oriented programming for system modeling, event-driven programming for graphical user interface, and functional programming for wrapping actions. However, learning different programming paradigms is quite difficult, especially when they are given as a whole. Recursion is a typical example since it originated in functional programming but was also included in most structured programming languages. As Dijkstra pointed out, learners who are familiar with structured programming tend to think about the control flow of recursion and get confused by how the recursion can be implemented. To address this issue, we developed a methodology along with system software to help novices think of recursive solutions from the definition rather than the implementation.

One of the ways of thinking about how to finish the learning task is through self-dialogue. Doing so enables learners to ask themselves what should they do and evaluate whether it is appropriate from another point of view. However, learners might have difficulties imagining the scenario and interacting with an imaginary person. They may need a scaffolding tool or a person as a partner to practice the self-dialogue. Besides, the ventriloquist phenomenon in education has been noted as beneficial for learning as it could make the learners understands the idea through dialogue. This study proposed a learning approach that allows the learners to use a robot as a ventriloquist doll for practicing self-dialogue and knowledge application to enhance their learning effectiveness. The experiment was conducted by participating 104 undergraduate learners who enrolled in a Japanese Hospitality Management course. The results showed that the approach used a ventriloquist robot to facilitate learning through self-dialogue exhibited significant effects on motivation, anxiety, and better learning outcomes. This study provides a novel area of insight into the use of robots in learning, by integrating digital technology with pedagogical approaches to create an immersive intelligent learning environment and offer a self-dialogue mechanism to foster collaborative learning tasks.

In the current digital situational learning, such as digital game-based learning or Second Life, learners use virtual characters to enter the situational learning, instead of using their own bodies. In addition, many subject matters requiring situational learning need a combination of subject knowledge, body language, and emotional expression, and require students to conduct group learning. However, most of the current situational systems can only provide evaluation and feedback on text or language, and cannot provide feedback on body movements and emotional expressions. To address these issues, this study establishes a situational learning system that enables students to enter the learning situation with their whole body and in small groups. Furthermore, the cognitive services of artificial intelligence are also adopted to conduct immediate evaluation and feedback on students’ learning performance, such as language, body movement, and emotional display, and students’ learning outcomes can be displayed in front of their peers. The experimental results show that the proposed situational learning system can improve students’ learning effect for subject matters that need to combine body movements and emotional expression.

To promote language learning performance, a realistic speech mission-based digital learning theater, which integrates with real-time spoken language evaluation and interactive switching of scenario and virtual costumes, was proposed in this study. Regarding evaluation, an AI chatbot is integrated into the digital learning theater to assign speech tasks to learners and evaluate their performance in terms of pronunciation and grammar, and then provide immediate feedback for improvement. Regarding interaction, with Kinect motion detection technology, learners can immerse themselves into the digital scene of drama with their whole body and wear various virtual costumes that can automatically match learners' body size and motions, to strengthen learners' interest and engagement in learning. This study was conducted on a Japanese language course for university students. The results suggest that students' learning outcomes and motivation can be enhanced with realistic speech mission-based digital learning theater.

Student audiences in drama-based learning classrooms must concentrate on the learning content of drama performance. Teachers spend much effort on teaching and classroom management, but less on student audience participation. To address this issue, this study proposes a digital theater environment with a robot to explore how the robot can interact with students while performing drama-based activities in the digital theater to improve students' engagement and help them to learn. A quasi-experimental study was conducted and 50 third-grade students from a local junior high school were involved in this study for six weeks. The results show that the learning performance of the experimental group is significantly better than that of the control group. Moreover, the results of questionnaires reveal that the interactive robot can enhance students' interest in learning and help them put concentration more on learning in digital learning theater.

Communication with other people includes oral language and body language, both of which are important, especially in the workplace. People learn how to react properly by the context and reaction. Therefore, the best way to learn communication is through practical communication exercises. This study proposes an approach where learners can enter digital workplace environment to learn both oral and body language. Meanwhile, with the advance of artificial intelligence technology, the real time assessments of body gestures become feasible. With the proposed digital reality, learns can simultaneously see their performance and get assessments and corrections in real time. The approach was empirically evaluated in a university of technology and the results showed a significant improvement in learning outcomes.

The aim of learning a language is to communicate with each other. In a drama that simulates problems taking place in real world, students can learn how to solve these problems via the communication and interaction with such a drama-based learning environment. On the other hand, besides oral interaction, visual interaction is essential as well. To address this issue, this study proposes a digital learning theater which combines itself with visual interaction learning forms and instant assessment. In this learning environment, students can learn a language by pictures and physical objects via visual interaction, and receive immediate feedback from the instant assessment of their learning performance provided by a virtual character. Consequently, students can realize whether their learning performance in the digital reality learning environment need to be improved. Furthermore, an experiment of the proposed learning environment was carried out in a Japanese language classroom for university students. The results suggest that students' learning performance is significantly improved.

In traditional teaching, teachers transmit knowledge, and students receive the information passively in the classroom. There are few opportunities as well as proper situations for students to apply the acquired knowledge, in other words, students do not know how to use what they have learned in their daily lives. In this study, we designed a system for learning by authoring scripts, setting stage, and performing comic dramas. Students may effectively practice and write scripts based on the content in textbooks. In addition, students will use the shooting and recording function in a tablet to perform their freeze-frame drama, they can be more creative and apply their knowledge to authentic situations. This learning system has been applied in the English course of sixth-grade students in an elementary school for one year. The experimental result shows that authoring script and performing comic drama could enhance student's ability of applying the learned knowledge in various situations.

This study aims to improve students' argumentative capability and enable them to produce better argumentative essays. The "digital argument-map writing system" was designed for this study to help students build a complete structure of argumentation step by step so they can produce better argumentative essays with the structure as a thinking frame. We conducted an experiment to the students in an elementary school in New Taipei City for one semester. The experimental result showed that the system provided by this study could improve the students' argumentative capability. From the result of regression analysis, we found that the students using the digital argument-map writing system had a more thorough thinking on the forming of argumentation. Their evidence accords with their reasons and their reasons accord with their claims. The argumentation in their argumentative essays is thus highly connective and more integrated.

"English Practice" is a mobile learning app that allows learners to test their English grammar usage. In this study, we observed 97,746 users and the results showed there are some factors might have certain influence on taking quiz score such as continent, country, time taking Quiz, and device screen size. First, learners who are from Europe tend to have the highest score. Asian learners ranked last in the list. Second, quiz answers in the morning and night had higher correct rate than in the afternoon and evening answers. Third, the screen size of mobile screen has possible correlation with Quiz score, as learner used a bigger screen, they got higher score. Moreover, research via store is one of the ways to conduct a research for mobile app and help us have more understanding about the users as well as get more clues to improve the apps, drive efficient marketing campaigns, and create a more pleasant experience for your users.

In this study, we adopt the concept of freezeframe dramas in transforming the learning objectives in textbooks into the four-cell comic drama performance. Learners utilize tablet computers to record sounds and images to complete their dramas as the means of increasing their motivation in learning. We name such freeze-frame comic dramas on tablets as the Video Comic Drama. In order to enhance students' participation in class, we suggest to perform dramas in groups. We ask instructors to do heterogeneous grouping based on students' learning situations. Students follow the instruction given by the system to complete their own four-cell comics in groups. We have observed that in group activities, group members would create social interdependence within their groups because students had mutual goals to achieve, which helped increase the opportunities for peer discussion. Both overachievers and underachievers have become more engaged in the activities. Moreover, the teacher may soon realize the learning situation of each student with a tablet, and conduct the group work demonstration in class. The demonstration enables students to learn from peers and to do reflexive thinking on their own dramas. The Video Comic Drama has been applied in the fifth-grade English course in an elementary school for one and half years. Both the interviews with teachers and the analysis of questionnaires showed that the Video Comic Drama largely improved all students' learning motivation and participation.

In this paper, we examined users' behavior and perception in a mobile English learning application called "English Practice" (EP app). EP app has been placed on Google Play store over four years and has more than 800.000 installed. The study was conducted over two months from October 2015 to December 2015 through Google Analytic by drawing on random sample of 106,912 active users from 208 countries, especially 48,176 active users of ten countries included India, Philippine, Sudan, Turkey, US, Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, Malaysia and Egypt were analyzed. The results showed among top ten countries, India, Philippines and Malaysia seem the countries where users spent the longer duration per session as well as more screen views per session. Further understanding about English language status among top ten countries, English popularity inside domestic was likely one of the reasons to explain the difference. In addition, the similar trend found among ten countries in which Quiz function seems been visited mostly, followed by Chat-room and Flashcard. Grammar lessons were the less popular function. We suggested that simplify learning task and reducing the content presenting in each session might look more apparel to users of EP app.

In this study, we evaluated the effect of push notifications on mobile app engagement. Over the duration of a month, we collected data from 12,071 online users of an English learning app named 'English Practice' which can be freely installed from the Google Play store. Four criteria of app engagement used by us were as follows: session count, session length, time consumption and retention. In addition, we examined the frequency of sending notifications, how to display notifications and the use of notifications on wearable devices. The results show that push notifications with regards to incoming messages can increase learner engagement most. On the other hand, abusing push notifications (e.g. if they are too frequent) result in the opposite effect. Based on the results, we suggest that educators or developers focus on an increased integration of social communication tools inside apps.

The purpose of this study was trying to understand what relationship exists between altruistic behaviors and learning styles. The proposed system provided opportunities for self-reflection, and encouraged students to do better assignments. When each style of learners learns with proper strategy, they can improve their learning efficiency. Environment for children to grow up will deeply affect their preference for learning styles and altruistic behaviors. In this way, for each style of learners who had altruistic behaviors, we can provide them some suitable learning approaches to help them. There are 47 technological and vocational schools' students in Taiwan participated in this experiment. The result showed that students whose learning style was tend to active, sequential and intuitive had significant correlation in one or two altruistic behaviors.

In order to let all students concentrate on their learning, teachers presented learning content with projector, projection screen and computer. However, it is not easy to immerse into their learning content and apply knowledge to real life. We construct an immersive and interactive learning playground with classroom and textbooks' content. Students can immerse into a virtual environment under authentic learning. In this research, we have an experiment in a school for a semester and discover that our system enhanced students' feeling of immersion and provided more interaction in learning.

Nowadays, it’s more and more important to have authentic instruction which lets students interact with learning context and apply their knowledge into real life. In this research, we construct a learning cinema authoring system. Teachers may edit backgrounds, characters and dialogues to construct a situation which is based on teaching context. Moreover, students could have an opportunity to learn in an authentic situation. After experiment, we discover that the system could help teachers on preparing authentic learning material. Students also have better motivation when they learn in the authentic situation.

In recent years, we have seen that users edited and shared information actively on various Social Network Sites (SNSs) and those sites are getting richer and more interesting. We expect students can have this mindset similarly on our learning stage. Our study proposed a social networking site for education. Like a stage for students, they can watch and show themselves. We observed altruistic motive and behavior of students on the platform. There were 30 college students participated. We had found that there were six altruistic behaviors. And Students’ altruistic motivations are enjoyment and self-development.

This is a quasi-experiment of a collaborative learning classroom implementation that prioritized learners' focus-attention for instructors to have an optimal focus management. A Kinect-based learning activity through a theatre-like learning setting called Digital Learning Playground was held to create a simple focus combining learning content and the peer performance. The triangulated data included non-participant observation, a questionnaire, and an informal interview Preliminary case study on focus management. The result demonstrated that students' live performance in the ongoing-task scenes has positive learning effect on the performer and the other peers.

This study extends Sheng-Jie Yang's study [5] and process long-term experiment, on the other hand, we don't have to force students to use any reading strategies because we want students to study by themselves. We investigated in detail the users' demand and using timing on visual cue map. At the end of semester, we present the final system through interviewing students for improving the visual cue map. Finally, we discuss about our contribution and the differences with Sheng-Jie Yang's e-book system.

People can acquire knowledge of rules, skills, strategies, beliefs or attitudes by observing others or through self-observation. This study proposed an approach that allows students to play a role for task-based learning in a classroom and can immediately observe their figures embedded in the virtual context. Reflection that the proposed approach might be able to support via self-observation plays an important role in learning process. Therefore, we examine the idea by conducting a case study in which college students were recruited to understand how the self-observation approach could affect their reflection. Comparing to the control group that students could not see their figures appearing in the virtual environment, statistic results show significant difference according to their subjective questionnaire results.

Reading is an important learning skill. But in Taiwan, the traditional education lead student to study passively when reading. Recently, the organization of text structure is thought to be an effective way on reading. On organizing, learners can comprehend and memorize their ideas by building their own text structure. Concept mapping is an organizing method which is widely used in education. This study designed an E-Book system with concept mapping function. We defined three concept mapping activities with different concept maps supported, Full Map, Partial Map and No Map. This study is to investigate the user behavior of reading through different supported map and see which is better helped on reading.

In our study, we will look at how the substantial context-embedded authentic tasks had been done under a high-interactive gaming structure in classroom basis. We analyzed the difference of intrinsic motivation (enjoyment, perceived competence, pressure, etc) and learning effectiveness between team players and individual players in the game-based learning environments.

This study used learning video portfolio to improve student's metacognition through actual learning. LVP lets students have the opportunity to review and self-assess: learning through imitation, self-monitoring, teacher assessment, expert reference system, and the whole concept allowing students to upgrade and enhance metacognition. We held an experiment to verify the effectiveness of this system and the results show that LVP can effectively enhance the Comprehension monitor and Evaluation.

This paper is a pilot study for a combination of school knowledge and board game learning. We designed a digital board game based on textbook materials. And presented them with a set of educational equipment- Digital Learning Playground (DLP). We created a situational interaction learning in classrooms. In this research, the resulted data indicates the students' motivation, confidence and satisfaction were enhanced through the designed learning environment.

Annotation is a frequently used learning skill. When taking note, the reader only focuses on partial content of a topic or a segment. The note would be non-organized and piecemeal. Therefore, the relationship between topic and annotation would be lost or indirect including the relationship among annotations. Thus, because of the dispersion of annotations, readers would lose the structure of the content that they marked and wrote. In order to integrate the drawback of dispersion of annotation, we designed a system for taking and reorganizing annotation based on the reader's knowledge structure. Therefore, all annotation would be integrated to keep the integrity of it. Thus in this study, we design a system with the function of highlighting and building a map to investigate whether the system enhances the learning performance of reader in a networked structure hyperlink condition.

In order to let students learn authentically, we provide an opportunity for them to learn naturally and apply knowledge by adding authentic learning experience in classrooms. We wanted to know whether integrating embodied interactions in authentic learning can enhance authentic learning experience, and even improve learning performance. In this research, we proposed a near-authentic environment that students can engage in a designed situation with their body movements. This study analyzed how this learning mechanic could enhance learning motivation or performance. We observed the subjects' perceptions of learning experience through the designed activity and examine whether they were engaging. This research uncovered that their intrinsic motivation was relatively high in this activity and there were some interesting behaviors among students' interactions.

An educational board game module integrating with textbook materials was introduced to current teachers. This module served as a teaching aid that was equipped with as set of educational equipment-Digital Learning Playground. The aim of the study was to investigate the feasibility of adding situated interaction with a board game structure into ordinary school settings.

This study developed a question-based learning process embedded on an e-book to help students’ textbook reading. We designed three reading phases: preview, reading, and review according to the reading strategy. In each phase, students were assisted by different questions. To evaluate the effect, we used this e-book in an experiment involving twenty-five students studying on a textbook content of computer science. Our research objectives are to test the effects of the system on academic performance and to evaluate whether the system use affects learner’s motivation and active reading.

We propose a novel approach to produce video portfolios in the classroom, allowing student’s whole body, which was captured by a Microsoft Kinect appear in a rich and context-sensitive background. The purpose of the study was to investigate this proposed system could impact on various learning style students' cognition and metacognition. The system makes the student have chance to examine and evaluate on one's own and then promotes metacognition. Experimental results indicated a variety of learning styles do affect the performance of learners, especially reflective and sense of style, metacognitive have a significant upgrade capacity by using the system.

In this paper, we embedded authentic learning content into a themed board game and presented them by a set of educational equipment-Digital Learning Playground (DLP). DLP applied the idea of mixed reality that students interact to the simulative situations, and also remain some hand-on experience with realia. With this device, we build a digital board game and require students and the teacher to join in to yield the best learning environment-proper assistance and peer cooperation. The showing resulting data depicts that the students were highly engaged and satisfied with learning through a gaming flow. With respect to learning performance, the assessing data indicates an effective learning has been achieved.

This study combined context-aware mechanisms with the main functions of smart phones to develop a motion-sensing and game-based mobile learning system that can provide related information about many plants in the Taipei Botanical Garden. This study developed six types of motions on smart phones involving common botanical misconceptions and integrated these motions into botany-themed learning activities. The purpose was to correct such misconceptions through motion-based learning. This study investigated the influence of whether or not using motion-sensing educational mobile games on learning achievement and learning retention. Experimental results showed that learning achievement in the experimental group (which used motion-sensing mobile learning) and the control group (which did use non-motion-sensing mobile learning) both were improved, moreover, the learning retention of the experimental group significantly exceeded those of the control group.

Using contextual cues to find or review information is a useful and natural skill. Reading of traditional books provides contextual cues to aid in memory recall and finding of information. On the contrary e-books do not support the generation of contextual cues so well. In an e-book, a reader finds information mostly from full-text searching and by using the scrollbar. However a trade-off between precision and recall may occur during the search, and scrollbars provide only a rough idea of approximate location in a document. Many studies have added cues to scrollbars (information spaces), but fewer studies have investigated what contextual cues are used by readers to find information and the behavior adopted in finding information by using contextual cues. According to our observations, names of chapters and subchapters are important contextual cues in finding information, because the reader can easily grasp their location within a document. However more tangible information space with more useful contextual cues within that space is necessary so that readers can grasp the structure of content.

In this paper, we propose AR-assisted digital learning playground that a teacher and students can stand around and complete tasks with a robot partner in the classroom. We applied Augmented Reality technology to conventional flashcards. AR cards serve as task toolkits that students use cards to trigger apt scenarios in the task. We assume that students can acquire knowledge by interacting with the apt scenarios shown on the screen. The result of the experiment depicts that this reflection-in-action learning mechanic yield relevant learning experience.

Most e-books support functions of highlighting, taking notes, and adding bookmarks for students to read the material, and these functions suffice for reading. However, when they want to review content, they are required to drag the scrollbar to revisit information, though the speed of turning pages varies, and they may frequently navigate unrelated chapters. Using contextual cues to help people revisit information is useful. According to our previous study, chapter names and the visualization of each page are critical for readers revisiting information. However, these cues are used depending on the reading habits of users. This study thus employs an SQ3R reading strategy to enable users to utilize more cues, and consequently presents a design of an e-book system with integrated contextual cues (space) and the SQ3R method. The results of the experiment shows that the proposed e-book system can help students enhance their learning and reviewing performances, and reduce the time to revisit information compared to a typical e-book.

Functional roles may explain the learning performance of groups. Detecting a functional role is critical for promoting group learning performance in computer-supported collaborative learning environments. However, it is not easy for teachers to identify the functional roles played by students in a web-based learning group, or the relationship between roles and group performance. In a web learning system, interactions among group members can be recorded as a large corpus for further analysis. Tools can then be developed to assist teachers to recognise the roles played by group members and determine the best intervention strategy to support group learning. This study designed a method to identify automatically the role played by students, through an analysis of their online collaborative learning interactions. A regression prediction strategy was proposed to predict group performance according to identified functional roles. Experimental results from a study of 82 students showed that the accuracy of detecting functional roles was acceptable, and the prediction of learning performance is useful for most functional roles except opinion-giver and harmoniser. Finally, three grouping strategies for collaborative learning are proposed from the perspective of functional role-distribution. Teachers can, therefore, recognise the status of group members' participation by identifying roles and reorganising the group to increase learning performance.

Students' affections in learning have a significant impact on engagement and learning outcomes. When students have negative emotions, they usually do not learn well. But current e-learning systems often lack many features of profound affection, and fail to provide suitable emotional interaction. In this paper, we evaluate some studies of affective interaction e-learning systems. We also proposed our approach to develop an emotionally interactive learning system.

In this paper, we introduce a learning playground in classroom implementation. Learning Playground is an interactive stage that learning content can be developed into an authentic, task-oriented scenario. Students can acquire knowledge by experiential learning in Learning Playground. Within current technical supports, we apply mixed reality to create a contextual learning platform and place a physical character, a robot, to connect learners and the virtual world. Referring to the experiment, we see learners’ motivations, involvement, pleasure and learning effectiveness increase, and they show their strong preference interacting with a robot with social emotions in the learning process.

Students’ affections have a significant impact on motivation and learning performance. Many researches revealed that humor has a great effect on students’ learning motivation and emotion. And some researchers thought empathy can increase students’ interests and self-efficiency and ease off negative emotions. Therefore, we try to add several emoticons into e-learning system to capture learners’ emotions and design a humorous and empathic virtual human to respond to learners’ emotions at proper moments. In this paper, we had done a preliminary experiment which showed the virtual human with humor and empathy can enhance learners’ motivation, learning performance, and ease learners’ emotions.

Paper and traditional books have been serving as useful tools in supporting knowledge-intensive tasks and school learning. Although learning strategies such as selective verbatim note-taking or question-asking may foster intentional recall or resolve comprehension difficulties in paper-based learning practice, improvement in learning may depend on the opportunity and quality of which students apply note-taking, review notes, or enhance comprehension through questioning. This study aims to complement a paper textbook with a mobile phone and to treat the combination as a whole to facilitate verbatim note-taking, resolving comprehension questions, and receiving reading recommendations. The textbook paragraphs were augmented with line numbers to facilitate coordination between the mobile phone and the paper textbook. An eight-week comparative study was conducted to explore the use of two reading vehicles. The results and findings show that using a mobile phone to augment paper-based learning is technically feasible and seems to promote the application of verbatim note-taking and posting comprehension questions for discussion. However, the results of two course tests indicate that consequent learning improvement seemed inconsistent among the students. A six-week case study was also conducted to explore the implications of the augmented support to students’ learning practice. The findings show that mobile phones as learning supportive tools to augment paper-based learning could support students’ planning and management of learning strategies or activities. The portability of mobile phones and paper textbooks and the ubiquitous connection of paper-based learning with an online learning community may provide the flexibility in planning ahead for suitable learning strategies or activities and may enhance students’ assessment for management of students’ learning goals.

Intention is an important factor to drive human behavior. With a certain intention, an action becomes more natural and reasonable. In this paper, an agent with intention, which not only possesses facial expressions, hand gestures, body motions, but also holds memory and personality, is presented. The agent exploits the social dialogue to show intention and its care for students in a learning system. The agent will purposefully guide students in the learning process, care about their needs during learning, provide empathy feedback in order to lessen their negative emotions, and offer appropriate reproach or encouragement to help them overcome the obstacles to English learning. A preliminary experiment will be done to show that this agent can interact with students more naturally and meanwhile strengthen their will to learn as well as make them more willing to accept the opinions from the agent.

In recent years, combining the empathic virtual human with the learning system is one of the most popular topics. However, there are few studies on designing pedagogical agents which have different empathic strategies to interact with learners. In this paper, we have described our approach to design an interactive empathic agent with different empathic strategies. We created an empathic interaction model according to Davis' empathic processes and Lester's empathic model. We invited 12 students to participate in this experiment. We had found some interactive suggestions when students suffered some negative or positive emotions during the learning process. These suggestions can make students feeling concerned and more engaged in learning.

From the review of many literatures, it is considered that there are still prevailing obstacles for second language learners due to insufficient vocabulary. Fortunately, there is a way to increase onepsilas vocabulary by means of extensive reading realizing stories. The research tries to utilize robot as a medium to design a pressure-free and intriguing learning system. It is a learning method imitating TPRS that enables learners to design a personal storytelling robot. The learners proceed with extensive reading during the process of designing a storytelling robot and achieve vocabulary acquisition through designing the movements of robots corresponded to the vocabulary by themselves. Our research is in a preliminary stage of realizing userspsila responses. Ten learners from graduate school students of National Central University Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, the result of tests and interviews will be the basis of further mass amount experiments and improvement.

Inter-trust is one of the important factors in collaborative learning. In the collaborative learning process, if the relationship between group members lacks trust to each other, the collaboration performance will be limit. If we can obtain the inter-trust of group members by the computer assist, teachers can take the information about the cooperation in team any time. Then teachers would have the ability to intervene and guide students to co-work at the right moment. In this study, a trust management system was proposed on Web site, and could provide trust score and personal advices to each student.

Through a field study computer science practices, we observed that students not only rely on the computer but also the programming textbook. To get overall comprehension, students organize their effort in understanding the abstract concept in the textbook and tracing the program execution constantly. The observations motivated us design an interactive textbook that integrates paper books with interactive multimedia supports for learning computer programming. Students could understand how program works from browsing multiple perspectives of program execution. We also facilitate the on-line query, enabling students to construct their own links with digital information. An evaluation with 11 students found this system can offer efficient access to the digital information while remain concentrating their attention on paper textbook, in a manner felicitous with their current reading practice.

Feeling cared for has important influence on physiology, cognition and emotional states. It plays a very crucial role in education and medical professions to help people deal with emotional problems. In this paper, we present an interactive caring agent which uses facial expressions, hand gestures, body movements, and social dialogue to show empathy and active listening for interacting with students in a learning system. The caring agent would listen to learners' social and affective needs, provide empathic feedback to recover from negative emotions (such as frustration), and encourage learners to overcome academic problems. The preliminary results revealed that the caring agent may not only increase the interaction between students and the learning system, but also have positive effects on students' emotions to make them more engaged in learning.

In this study, we proposed a new methodology to combine the paper slides, computer screen and a digital pen in order to improve teachers teaching and students learning in the traditional classroom. In students' learning, we design the new course slides which have kept the habit students had a class in the past, and integrate the advantage of real-time online support. In instructors' teaching, instructors can immediately get students' learning status, and change their teaching strategies by recommendations of the system.

The ease of interaction and operation of a wiki system allows for mass collaborative authoring. This paper reports how an authentic learning community is constructed through wiki for advanced group collaboration as well as knowledge sharing. In our community, each student member is assigned a role for his or her homework. Depending on their roles, students must perform different tasks and collect different information. By this way, they learn not only programming skills but also how to collaborate with teammates. Eventually the results of data analysis and grades indicate that our method can raise not only the knowledge amount effectively but also students' peer supports by using wiki.

We are developing a storytelling robot which learns by children's teaching. The robot is used on learning of the second language. It can reduce the negative emotion due to the anxiety of speaking foreign language, which thus motivates learning and enhances the speaking and listening abilities. Presently, our system is still at the initial stage of research. Therefore, we only interviewed and experimented on some of the children now. These results will be used to improve our system.

This paper introduces software which enables teachers create robot as a partner easily and find out how to help a teacher difficulties when using storytelling lessons. First of all, we must understand the relations between storytelling and language learning, and the benefit of a robot being the assistance of a teacher during the lesson. In the next step, let teachers use the "programming a robot into a storytelling tool" and design the "story time" during English class. According to the evaluation result, there was highly satisfied in the new system implementation and effectively improved teacher's organization and technique of difficulties in the storytelling lesson. In addition, tester also had the confidence to improve students' participation and atmosphere during the storytelling activities.

Although quality of display devices is good right now, most textbooks are still printed on papers. At the same time, most learning support and e-learning courseware are built with the assumption that the student only read information displayed on the screen. In this paper, we present an environment that provides learning support via computers, digital devices and network when a student studies a course by reading paper textbooks with a digital pen. The learning support is organized based on the knowledge unit of the location positioning by the digital pen in the textbook. The support includes term explanation, related discussions, underline, and annotation. These studying actions and results on papers will be stored in the computer as well for later use. Initial experiment result on using the system shows that students feel beneficial to their study.

Relational robot is an intelligent conversational agent designed to be a learning secretary for student to notify student of using our learning Web site on time. In this paper we discuss some modules of relational robot to let it play a learning secretary role; it contains interaction module (verbal communication unit, nonverbal communication unit and process unit), internet interface, and communication interface with structure dialogue

Advancement in robotic research enables robot can assist human in many way. However, few researches have been done on applying on education. This paper reports field trials of using robot in an English learning classroom. In our experiment, the robot plays as a partner of a teacher. Five models of collaboration between teachers and robot are proposed. Teachers design the course flow in advance based on the learning content and these five models. Formative evaluations of the experiments are presented to show the impact of adopting robot in the classroom

This study presented a methodology in which the paper and a mobile phone can complement each other to facilitate ubiquitous learning support. Students, teachers and experts forming a learning community could support with each other as well as exchange their opinions ubiquitously through the links of interactions among paper and mobile phones. We conducted an experiment to evaluate the reading preference as well as effect on learning performance and interviews to explore the interaction among them. Experiment results and interviews showed students preferred reading large text on the paper while browsing recommendation messages or summaries on mobile phones with the help of the paper interface. In addition, these manners of interactions could provide more opportunities for learning support and could have a positive effect on learning performance.

When students encounter problems during learning process, they need support on time. Nevertheless, most references or answers are distributed in different books or Web content. Therefore, students need to break their reading process and spend much time to search answers from different reference books. Otherwise, increased frustration and confusion will decrease the students' learning performance. This research proposed a Web-based learning environment with contextual knowledge and expert recommending mechanisms for students' problem solving when they are reading e-books. A Web dictionary and a library of examples were constructed beforehand to support students referring. A Q&A forum was also constructed for students consulting directly. Classmates will be notified as mentors to answer peers' questions if those articles in forum could not solve students' questions. Experiment results show that students prefer referring knowledge and joining discussion in our system then the same system just without those functions. Our mechanism also shortened the response time about student's questions posting in forum.

Knowledge can be created in an active dialogue among those who seek to understand and apply concepts. Most of Web-based learning systems provide a discussion forum to create knowledge. However, discussion forum posts are separated from the context of the learning activities. Students must manually rebuild the context of their questions before posting. Students also commented that they had problems interpreting the answers to the questions posted. This paper proposes an online e-book annotation interface that enables students to post a question directly and receive timely adaptive mentoring in the place and context where question encountered in reading e-book, and to use anchors to access discussions in a forum. And, a mentor recommender, based on the preference and knowledge level of the students, is provided to recommend appropriate capable peers to answer the issued questions. The experiment results showed that the discussions were increased significantly, and about 80% of students indicated that they benefited greatly by adaptive peer help.

The Internet and web environment allow readers to read online many multimedia books. Readers can annotate, collaborate, and discuss content using efficient reading functions. Reading is migrating from printed books to e-books. This study designs an online reading environment with a wide range of support to increase students' learning performance. Online knowledge and human resources are used to answer directly students' queries. Students' annotating behaviors are analyzed as to help them understand the results of their learning earlier on. Experimental results reveal the extent to which students' reading behaviors shift from the printed book to this system using online reading time analysis. Data and questionnaire results show that students think that the system is conveniently and efficiently for them to annotate and propose query strings to knowledge repository and to discussion forum. In assessing reading performance, analysis of students' annotation results can forecast examination grades with 75.5 accuracy. Such analysis helps teachers and students to increase teaching and learning efficiencies.

We utilize Web and database technology to construct a journal based portfolios assessment system to realize a legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) (J. Lave et al., 1990) learning community. In the system, we divide system into three layers, the view layer presents data by the Oracle Portal Server, the data layer stores data by the Oracle Database Server and the operating control layer operates workflow by the Oracle Database trigger. Job data analysis and a questionnaire indicates that the Web Journal is effective to promote knowledge exchange. Students can improve learning performance and it can form a LPP structure. The purpose of using the journal approach [Roth, W.M. (1997)] is to emulate the forming of academic societies formed by journals. At the same time, the achievement of students in a course is based on their publications in journals and the positions they played in the journals. First, students submit their work such as homework, learning portfolios, reports of organizing contents in the discussion, learning problems, related Web sites. Each submitted article would be assessed by three peers. Then the reviewers will review the submitted works. The reviewers will give comments to students. The journal system will publish good articles. Articles published include submitted works and reviewer's comments hoping that students will contribute and exchange their knowledge.

Mobile techniques make information transform more efficiently. Many learning strategies will become more effectively under the supporting of significant and real time information. Three kinds of information awareness mechanisms using mobile devices are proposed to assist students to promote learning performance of students. Mechanisms for improving learning status awareness, schedule awareness, and mentor awareness are developed to recommend students what should learn, what should do and who could be of help for a problem by transferring information through cell phone short message to students. Experiments have been performed and the results show that most students satisfy with system's recommendation and these awareness mechanisms have positive affect to students.

Role theory has been proposed to explain group teamwork. Thus, it may also be valid to explain group learning performance. However, teachers in both conventional classrooms and web learning systems find it difficult to figure out what role a student played in a group and what relationship exists between roles and group performance. In a web learning system, interactions among group members can be recorded in a database. Computer tools can be developed to do the tasks for teachers. In this paper we develop a tool to capture the roles that a student plays in her/his learning group. Then, tools using machine learning techniques are built to find the relationship between existence of roles and group performance. A tool was then built to predict the group performance based on the relationship captured. An experimental result is shown that demonstrates that role theory is effective to predict group performance.

Concept maps have been widely put to educational uses. Concept maps in the past were limited in their assessment standards. Some only take concept nodes into consideration; other evaluation criteria use concept nodes as the basis, with relation links playing a minor role. To address this problem, this study proposes a new style of concept map, called weighted concept map, which assigns a weight to each proposition in a concept map to represent its importance. This study proposes a new assessment with qualitative comparison founded on a weighted concept map.

Owing to the lack of face-to-face interactions, students using a web-based learning system are likely to study alone and with relatively little classmate support and pressure. Teachers in a web-based learning system may apply the group-learning model to overcome this problem. Therefore, teachers first need to organize, manage, and monitor the group learning. Additionally, they must take appropriate actions based on teaching strategies to improve the learning achievements of the students. To perform these tasks effectively, the teachers must obtain relevant information by searching and analyzing the huge amount of web-access logs or by monitoring web interactions. This will be burdensome and difficult to do well for the teachers. This work presents novel methodologies for developing instruments to assist teachers in performing grouping, intervention and strategy analysis. The proposed methodologies apply data mining tools provided by existing database management systems. A tool is initially R developed to assist in organizing learning groups according to teacher specifications. Database techniques, including multidimensional cube, are then applied to make student web logs meaningful and helpful to teachers in managing group learning. The associate rule mining tool is finally employed to assist teachers in analyzing their pedagogical strategies. These tools relieve the teacher of tedious data collection and analysis, and thus can focus on managing the groups to promote student learning achievement.

As database and workflow technologies are used to manage business processes, decision-makers of enterprises must query the execution of business processes to understand and refine these processes for expected throughput and quality. Introducing the representation of business processes in the database schema allows the execution histories of business processes to be maintained in the database for supporting queries on how business processes are executed. In this work, we incorporate finite state machines into the entity-relationship (ER) model for representing business processes in the database schema. Analytical systems can be developed in the proposed representation to assist decision-makers in observing the business processes.

Existing temporal databases focus on the management of data history. However, it may be required to know how users, procedures and policies affect the data value changes in decision support system and database debugging or maintaining systems. If so, the object model needs to incorporate the behavioral modeling of data objects. We propose a model using finite state machines, method signatures and a method invocation network to model the behavior between objects. A type system is also devised to enforce the substitutability of subtype objects in the class inheritance hierarchy. A decision maker or database application developer can query the effect of events by using the proposed object model.

The World Wide Web (WWW) is in widespread use. People in different places can read hypermedia information through a computer network. Therefore, many educators have tried to develop a distance learning system on WWW so that people in different places can learn. However, some learning activities, such as discussion, collaboration, and conference, are difficult to implement on WWW for teachers who are not computer science majors. We propose a methodology by which teachers can build their collaborative learning activities on WWW effortlessly. The specification language, called Learning Activities Description (LAD), is devised for teachers to specify their learning activities and styles. Our system can generate the required programs according to the LAD specification. Therefore, designing learning activities using LAD can be as easy as designing courseware using HTML.

In order to manage the history of objects in a database, some researchers have proposed temporal database systems. However, data change is always caused by the behavior of objects. A database application may not only need the data history of objects but also the behavioral history of objects. Current temporal databases only consider the data history of objects but do not take the behavioral history of objects into account. The purpose of this paper is to extend the capability of current object-oriented databases so that they can manage the data history and behavioral history of objects. The paper discusses a data model, query language and a storage system. A prototype system is developed on the Gemstone object oriented database system.

This paper describes an intelligent component database system that delivers components to synthesis tools when given a set of attributes and constraints. Requirements of a component server are defined and an implementation is described. Our experiments demonstrate that such a component sever can replace component libraries and component catalogs with hundreds of pages.