Educational games offer an effective means to enhance interactive learning experiences. However, developing high quality educational games is difficult. In particular, integrating didactic goals into a game’s design, and verifying the learning outcomes is a complex iterative process. Due to a lack of control over these concerns, fully developed games may lack the intended educational value. We aim to improve educational game development by structuring and partly automating this process. We propose Didactics-Driven Development, a novel framework for keeping didactic goals and concerns in focus throughout the development process. By making didactic concerns explicit, it enables testing interaction patterns against opportunities for learning. We discuss how the approach has been applied to three case studies and how this has informed ongoing development of the framework.

Card game creation is a powerful tool for game design. Using playing cards, game designers can rapidly prototype and iteratively playtest a game’s core mechanisms to explore alternatives and improve the gameplay. However, this process is time-consuming, imprecise and challenging to steer and focus. We aim to empower designers with solutions that automate game design processes. In particular, we study to what extent a unified game design language can offer theoretical foundations, systematic techniques and practical solutions.

Tactile displays can be used without demanding the attention from the human visual system, which makes them attractive for use in wayfinding contexts, where visual attention should be directed at traffic and other information in the environment. To investigate the potential of tactile navigation for cyclists, we have designed and implemented Vibrobelt. This belt, worn around the waist, gives waypoint, distance and endpoint information using directional tactile cues. We evaluated Vibrobelt by comparing it to a visual navigation application. Twenty participants were asked to cycle two routes, each route with a different application. We measured the spatial knowledge acquisition and analyzed the visual focus of the participants. We found that Vibrobelt was successful at guiding all participants to their destinations over an unfamiliar route. Participants using Vibrobelt showed a lower error rate for recognizing images from the route than users of the visual system. Users of the visual system were generally navigating faster, and were better at recalling the route, showing a higher contextual route understanding. The endpoint distance encoding was not always correctly interpreted. Future research will improve Vibrobelt by making a clearer distinction between waypoint and endpoint information, and will test users in more complex navigational situations.

This paper describes a field study evaluating a mobile map application for the Paris Air Show. The aim of the study was to investigate how well users can navigate (to static and moving targets) and orient themselves in a fair (an unknown environment posing realistic challenges for wayfinding) with a mobile map system. The study involved 14 fair visitors who carried out three navigation tasks, which required them to switch between map navigation and deciding upon their orientation in the physical environment. Our results indicate that navigation and orientation are not as tightly coupled as described in the traditional wayfinding literature and may require different modality approaches to optimally support users. Based on this, we draw design implications on how to balance supporting the user in navigation and orientation with mobile systems without diminishing users' awareness of their surroundings.

In this paper we present first results of an observation study on indoor navigation behaviour of visitors at a large public fair. As an outcome we present a number of requirements for mobile indoor navigation systems that support collaborative destination and path finding tasks.

Easy to use workbenches for Qualitative Reasoning (QR) and Modelling are virtually nonexistent. This has a limiting effect on the use and uptake of the technology by a larger audience. We present Garp3, a user-friendly workbench that allows modellers to build, simulate, and inspect qualitative models. Garp3 can be used to, discover, capture, and share conceptual knowledge on how systems behave.