This paper presents the SMACITE training program, developed as the primary output of a 3-year Erasmus+ project aimed at addressing the skills gap in the smart cities sector by reskilling and upskilling both current and prospective professionals. The training program features a dual-format educational approach that includes a MOOC for asynchronous learning on Smart Cities enabling technologies and a Virtual Worlds platform for synchronous teaching of horizontal skills. The training program is based on a multidisciplinary curriculum that promotes personalized learning pathways through the MOOC by integrating a diagnostic tool that aims to identify prior knowledge and skills of learners and propose specific courses or modules of a course to attend. Piloted between February and October 2024, the training program attracted 330 participants from Greece, Italy, Bulgaria, and Spain, comprising university students, vocational trainees, and professionals from both the private and public sectors. The feedback collected about the courses from the participants was high, ranging on average -at a scale from 1 to 5- between 3.99 and 4.44 for the courses addressing Smart Cities Engineers and between 3.71 and 4.42 for the courses addressing Smart Cities Technicians.

While teachers generally favour gamification for its potential to boost student motivation, engagement, and learning, they express concerns over time constraints, resource demands, and risks of over-reliance on game-based mechanics. The study explores Greek educators' perspectives on integrating simple, customizable gamification tools, especially online educational games, for middle school education, based on a sample of 360 educators. The study involved a two-phase methodology where both in-service and pre-service educators watched a demo video of educational games relevant to their teaching subject, followed by a questionnaire. Using SEM, the study tested 14 hypotheses to examine the direct effects of game dynamics, game elements, game mechanics, satisfaction, and engagement on perceived learning, with engagement and satisfaction also being analysed as mediators. The findings reveal that well-integrated game dynamics influence positively perceived learning, but also that game elements are unlikely to impact learning unless closely tied to educational content. Moreover, engagement and satisfaction have crucial mediating roles.

The paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of “Let's be Pirates”, a treasure hunt educational LBG. The game allows players to roam to a certain area in Patras city and with the use of a GPS enabled device, follow a tour around points of historical interest. It was implemented in TaleBlazer and addresses youngsters and teens aged from 12 year to 18. The design of the game follows the PACT theoretical framework and applies the Gestalt design principles. The paper discusses the parameters considered for a human-centered design, the functional options supported, and the two-phase evaluation methodology applied. The first phase was conducted via a Skype videocall for the remote application of the Think Aloud protocol. In the second phase the game was assessed for the level of engagement and its gamification elements in a “1-5” Likert scale. Moreover, the pervasive game flow model was applied to provide information about the level of enjoyment achieved in terms of concentration, challenge, player skills, control, clear goals, and feedback.

This paper describes the design and delivery of a postgraduate course on “Design and Evaluation of Interactive Systems”, part of an M.Sc. program on Human-Computer Interaction jointly offered by the Computer Engineering and Informatics Department and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. This course was initially intended to use the flipped classroom model but was shifted online due to the COVID-19 lockdown imposed during the Spring 2020 semester. The paper discusses student attitudes towards the online flipped classroom model and draws preliminary conclusions on the advantages and limitations of the approach. Qualitative and quantitative assessment data indicate a positive overall students' perception of the online flipped classroom model.

The intuitiveness of gestural devices offers great potential for more physical ways of interacting, but it is imperative that such devices comply with existing, platform-independent usability principles that have proven their effect in heterogeneous settings over the last decades. This study focuses on iPhone, one of the most widely used haptic devices and reviews the usability problems of five built-in iPhone applications documented in related sources. The study investigates whether these problems are actually reported during testing with novice users, which is their severity and whether testing reveals additional issues. Overall, the study confirmed the list of usability problems documented and stressed the importance of conforming to established usability principles.

Understanding and modeling user online behavior, as well as predicting future requests remain an open challenge for researchers, analysts and marketers. In this paper, we propose an efficient prediction schema based on the extraction of sequential navigation patterns from server log files, combined with web site topology. Traversed paths are monitored, internally recorded and cleaned before being completed with cashed page views. After session and episode identification follows the construction of n-grams. Prediction is based upon a 5 + n-gram schema with all lower level n-grams participating, a procedure that resembles the construction of an All 5th-order Markov Model. The schema achieves full coverage while maintaining competitive prediction precision.