The use of serious games in education is becoming more widespread, offering new ways to engage students and enhance their learning experience. However, it remains crucial to evaluate their effectiveness using reliable tools. The University of Turin has developed a serious game called "The murderer at the High-Tech Institute" for Mathematics that focuses on the functions of a single real variable. The game aims to facilitate the learning of the subject for university students in non-mathematical degree programmes. To qualitatively evaluate the tool, the research group developed a final questionnaire for students to complete after the game, based on validated questionnaires from the literature, including the Technology Acceptance Model and the System Usability Scale. The purpose of the questionnaire is to investigate the impact of digital game-based learning in Mathematics by measuring key aspects such as usability, effectiveness in learning Mathematics, game experience and attractiveness. A total of 156 university students answered the questionnaire after completing the serious game. This paper examines the stages of questionnaire development, from initial design to reliability study and exploratory factor analysis. The reliability of the questionnaire is discussed. The factor analysis reveals four key dimensions. Additionally, the trends in students' responses from the study are discussed, and potential improvements for future experimentation with the game are highlighted.

Modern scientific discovery is frequently backed by largescale scientific experiments, which cannot prescind from the unparalleled computational capabilities provided by highperformance computing systems. However, large data centers usually prioritize system efficiency over user accessibility, posing challenges for researchers without advanced computer science expertise. This work introduces BookedSlurm, a secure and userfocused extension of the Slurm workload manager, aiming to democratize HPC access across interdisciplinary research domains. BookedSlurm enables a partially decentralized regulation of finegrained advanced resource reservations through a novel creditbased framework, ensuring fair and predictable access to computing resources. Its modular architecture leverages dedicated microservices to manage reservations, credit handling, and accounting. These components are exposed through a secure REST API and an intuitive webbased dashboard, enhancing system usability for novice and expert users. While the dashboard simplifies interactions for nonspecialists, advanced users can directly access agentlevel APIs for more complex and automated operations. The effectiveness of BookedSlurm is validated on a realworld bioinformatics use case from the SUSMIRRI.IT project, showcasing its ability to enhance usability, optimize job scheduling, and streamline execution workflows.

The HPC4AI datacenter hosted at the Computer Science Department of the University of Turin was born to address the exponentially increasing computing needs of cross-disciplinary research on AI. To address the needs of modern AI, HPC4AI rethinks the traditional usage of Cloud and HPC systems where the Cloud provides a modern interface for HPC, and HPC serves as an accelerator for the cloud. To date, it has supported 40+ research projects across a broad range of domains, from astronomy and medicine to human sciences. Furthermore, it acts as an R&D platform to study, develop, and test new datacenter technologies. As such, it hosts a zoo of exotic computing platforms and the first prototype of two-phase evaporative server cooling. This work describes operating and managing HPC4AI with its challenges and lessons learned, with an analysis of key opportunities for digital twins.

BACKGROUND: The analysis of large and complex biological datasets in bioinformatics poses a significant challenge to achieving reproducible research outcomes due to inconsistencies and the lack of standardization in the analysis process. These issues can lead to discrepancies in results, undermining the credibility and impact of bioinformatics research and creating mistrust in the scientific process. To address these challenges, open science practices such as sharing data, code, and methods have been encouraged. RESULTS: CREDO, a Customizable, REproducible, DOcker file generator for bioinformatics applications, has been developed as a tool to moderate reproducibility issues by building and distributing docker containers with embedded bioinformatics tools. CREDO simplifies the process of generating Docker images, facilitating reproducibility and efficient research in bioinformatics. The crucial step in generating a Docker image is creating the Dockerfile, which requires incorporating heterogeneous packages and environments such as Bioconductor and Conda. CREDO stores all required package information and dependencies in a Github-compatible format to enhance Docker image reproducibility, allowing easy image creation from scratch. The user-friendly GUI and CREDO's ability to generate modular Docker images make it an ideal tool for life scientists to efficiently create Docker images. Overall, CREDO is a valuable tool for addressing reproducibility issues in bioinformatics research and promoting open science practices.

Research on Learning Analytics is closely related to the use of a Digital Learning Environment, which can be defined as a learning ecosystem in which to teach, learn and develop skills in the classroom, online or in hybrid mode. Using this, Educational Data, continuously updated and growing, have become Big Data. To make the most of these data, it is useful to use Learning Analytics techniques to analyze and interpret them, and to obtain enough information to make decisions. Predicting student learning outcomes is one of the main topics in learning analytics research. This research work has the main goal of building a model for predicting which score range students will achieve at the end of the online training. In this way, in future editions of the project, by analyzing the situation of students during the online training, we may provide students with personalized feedback to increase their involvement in the training and prevent dropouts. We analyzed three past editions of the Digital Math Training online training and developed two Random Forest models capable of predicting the final score range obtained by the students after the first three and the first six problems. We have also developed two Probabilistic Neural Network models with the same purpose, but with worse results.

The designers of a new coordination interface enacting complex workflows have to tackle a dichotomy: choosing a language-independent or language-dependent approach. Language-independent approaches decouple workflow models from the host code’s business logic and advocate portability. Language-dependent approaches foster flexibility and performance by adopting the same host language for business and coordination code. Jupyter Notebooks, with their capability to describe both imperative and declarative code in a unique format, allow taking the best of the two approaches, maintaining a clear separation between application and coordination layers but still providing a unified interface to both aspects. We advocate the Jupyter Notebooks’ potential to express complex distributed workflows, identifying the general requirements for a Jupyter-based Workflow Management System (WMS) and introducing a proof-of-concept portable implementation working on hybrid Cloud-HPC infrastructures. As a byproduct, we extended the vanilla IPython kernel with workflow-based parallel and distributed execution capabilities. The proposed Jupyter-workflow (Jw) system is evaluated on common scenarios for High Performance Computing (HPC) and Cloud, showing its potential in lowering the barriers between prototypical Notebooks and production-ready implementations.

Engagement is one of the most powerful driving forces that moves learners forward in a learning experience. The effects of engagement are related with enjoyment in learning, good results and prevention to drop-outs. Technologies, and in particular automatic formative assessment, can positively influence engagement, as well as providing data to measure it. This paper discusses how computer-based activities with automatic formative assessment and interactive feedback can promote engagement in Mathematics at school level. After discussing a theoretical framework for defining and measuring engagement, the potentialities of activities with automatic formative assessment and interactive feedback designed according to a specific model are illustrated. The activities have been experimented with 299 students of grade 8 in Italy. Through questionnaires administered before and at the end of the experimentation and through data from the online platform, the effects of the online activities on student engagement is evaluated. The activities resulted particularly effective to increase the engagement level in students that had low attitudes toward Mathematics at the beginning of the project.

In April 2018, under the auspices of the POR-FESR 2014-2020 program of Italian Piedmont Region, the Turin's Centre on High-Performance Computing for Artificial Intelligence (HPC4AI) was funded with a capital investment of 4.5M€ and it began its deployment. HPC4AI aims to facilitate scientific research and engineering in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Analytics. HPC4AI will specifically focus on methods for the on-demand provisioning of AI and BDA Cloud services to the regional and national industrial community, which includes the large regional ecosystem of Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) active in many different sectors such as automotive, aerospace, mechatronics, manufacturing, health and agrifood.

Formative assessment is a practice aimed to enhance teaching and learning and to develop self-regulation. Among the strategies for activating formative assessment, the provision of feedback is one of the most studied: good feedback helps close the gap between actual and desired performance and it promotes self-regulation. Automatic Assessment Systems can improve the practice of formative assessment, especially for the immediacy of feedback and the flexible solutions for questioning. In this context, the Department of Mathematics of the University of Turin has developed a model for automatic formative assessment using an automatic assessment system suitable for STEM disciplines. The key features of the model, grounded on the models from the literature, are: availability, algorithmic questions, open answers, immediate feedback, interactive feedback, and contextualization. These are detailed and discussed through evidence gained from three experimentations, involving the total number of 553 students. In particular, it emerges that the use of interactive feedback ensures that students process the information from the feedback and use it to improve their performance, thus solving the major problem raised in the literature that feedback are not useful when students do not read them.

This paper presents a model for structuring shared resources, proposed to activate learners' formative and proactive assessment processes by enhancing the sharing-workflow among instructors. The model is based on the features of a Virtual Learning Community (VLC), and provides for the development and reuse of ontologies. The adoption of the model for the implementation of an adaptive system for the dispatching of materials is discussed on the basis of the results from clustering analyses. Semantic-similarity measures are compared by their application for clustering a collection of mathematical questions for automatic assessment, created by instructors within a national-wide VLC for Secondary Schools.

Adaptive teaching consists in a teaching style aimed at overcoming inner differences among learners by providing them tailored ways to achieve outcomes according to their learning style, culture and needs. ICTs play an important role in supporting teachers with the adoption of adaptive strategies. Adaptive teaching acquires relevance in contexts of scholastic remediation and in reducing failures. The paper presents and discusses how adaptive teaching is used within "Scuola dei Compiti", a project proposed by the City of Turin (Italy) in collaboration with the University and the Polytechnic of Turin, aimed at reducing the drop-out rate and at enhancing scholastic success. University students help groups of 5-6 students aged 13-15 with their difficulties in the main subjects (Mathematics, Italian Language, Foreign Languages). Part of the Mathematics courses adopt a set of innovative computer based methodologies developed by the Department of Mathematics of the University of Turin, including a virtual learning environment integrated with an advanced computing environment, an automatic assessment system and a web-conference tool, which supports adaptive teaching. The project has involved over 7500 students in the last 5 years, the results achieved, discussed in the paper, show the effectiveness of these methodologies with respect to traditional teaching methods.

This paper shows the model developed by the University of Turin to support students that must face the transition from the last year of secondary school to the first year of University. Integrations that are specifically designed for Learning Management Systems help sustain three effective actions conducted in synergy: increase students' awareness in the choice of the future course of study, support them in taking the admission tests and the first-year exams, allow the autonomous administration of admission tests led by the University. The methodological strategies adopted are presented and discussed based on the analysis of the data of the years 2015 and 2016.

ShareGrid is a peer-to-peer desktop grid aimed at satisfying the computing needs of the small research laboratories located in the Piedmont area in Northern Italy. Share- Grid adopts a cooperative approach, in which each participant allows the other ones to use his/her own resources on a reciprocity basis. ShareGrid is based on the OurGrid middleware, that provides a set of mechanisms enabling participating entities to quickly, fairly, and securely share their resources. In this paper we report our experience in designing, deploying, and using ShareGrid, and we describe the applications using it, as well as the lessons we learned, the problems that still remain open, and some possible solutions to them.