eShadow is a digital storytelling platform inspired by traditional Shadow Theatre. It enables the creation of digital stories within a project-based approach that may start from scenario development and include the creation of digital puppets and sceneries, the set-up and recording of story scenes and the final assembly of a digital story. This paper presents how eShadow can be enhanced to solve the problem of creating mixed reality installations to offer rich learning experiences in informal learning settings. This enhanced version is eShadow+ and it is evaluated via two installations which are described and compared. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach thus offering new learning opportunities that are aligned with current trends in the use of mixed reality technologies.

The ”ADDventurous Rhythmical Planet” is a multimodal 3D serious game that exploits the benefits of music and rhythm to help children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) to confront important psychosocial challenges. Music is shown to significantly help children maintain focused attention as well as offer a timed structure around their actions, involving melody and tempo. The advantages of music are exploited in the game, using a tin drum. This drum is used by the player to produce rhythm and it is connected to the computer via a Makey Makey board. This board sends each drum knock as a mouse click signal to the computer. Using the drum, the player tries to reproduce a given beat, and subsequently synchronize with another player, so that they cooperatively produce an expected beat. This creates a connection between the real and the virtual world of the game. In order for the hero of the game to progress in the game, the player uses the tin drum to reproduce a number of rhythms. After completing the single-user mode, the player moves on to the multi-user mode. In this mode, the two players have to hold hands and use the tin drum to collaboratively reproduce the requested beat. For the input management and comparison of rhythms, a special algorithm was implemented. The algorithm takes the beat created by the player and compares it to the expected beat. The player completes the game level if the rhythm played is similar enough to the rhythm heard. If not, the player tries again to reproduce the expected rhythm. The player receives a visual representation of the beat played, showing the correct knocks and the wrong ones. The pilot evaluation presented confirms the effectiveness of the game and demonstrates the benefits of rhythm in order to enhance social skills and collaboration between children.

Cognizant use of technology is essential in offering a pedagogically rich, inclusive, creative and equitable digital learning experience to students. Teachers may need to develop digital skills and competencies that would propagate a constructive and cultural inclusive digital learning environment for orchestrating flexible and activity-oriented learning through synchronous and asynchronous learning tools. This study presents a digital competency framework discerned from a qualitative study on teachers' understandings of digital competencies for digital teaching and learning. Thirty-eight (n=38) teachers completed an online questionnaire as means to elicit beliefs on what constitutes digital competency development for digital teaching and learning. The results revealed six (6) digital competencies and associated sub-competencies that may be perceived as a point of departure for teachers to build on new or extend existing competencies. A reflection on implications around digital content, data and information, pedagogy, creativity and inclusion is perpetuated for optimising and leveraging teaching and learning in a connected and networked digital learning ecosystem.

STEM learning communities provide a structure for social interactions among students, their peers and STEM professionals that benefit students to acquire computational literacy and persistence in science disciplines. Focusing on STEM skills development at secondary education level, a female Computer Science teacher at the 7th public Junior High school of Athens Greece, founded the voluntary Coding Club “GreekCodersK12”. This K-12 education initiative ran for 4 years (2015-2019), formed a learning community based on creativity, innovation and digital skills enhancement and collaborated with researchers, professionals, scientists who contributed voluntarily in the Club’s projects. This paper presents the experiences gained and the lessons learned during this four-year period and throws light on the role of a potential Coding Club founder. The results of this learning path, indicate that a Coding Club is an inclusive after-school programme that can function as an umbrella for innovative activities like programming, educational robotics, STEM, STEAM and ESTEAM (Entrepreneurship – Science – Technology – Engineering – Art – Mathematics).

This paper presents a learning community building framework and how it is being used to establish a learning community on the mathematical foundations of computer hardware, namely the binary system. The work builds on previous research efforts targeting gamification of mathematics and is seen under new light offered by the Theatre in Mathematics (TIM) Methodology. The result is a combination of a theatrical game and a board game to teach the binary system to children. The two games are closely related: The theatrical game uses the children's bodies to enact the mechanism of the board game by employing simple rules for interacting with each other. Following simple rules the participants embody the operation of a calculator that is able to transform integers into their binary representations and compute the result of the four arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). A simulator of the theatrical game is also offered so that learners can explore it for themselves and discover how the arithmetic operations are done, even when they are not in the same physical space with their peers. The board game is essentially a binary version of a counting table or abacus. It offers an alternative mechanism for understanding the validity of the rules of the theatrical game and makes these rules more concrete and accessible to the children. This way they can explore on an individual basis the way that the four arithmetic operations are performed. Both games offer new learning opportunities, when compared with previous work related to game-based teaching of the binary system. The games surveyed mainly focus on the binary representation of numbers without engaging students in active exploration of arithmetic operations in the binary system. Another important aspect of this work is its unplugged nature that enables students to engage their body in a playful inquiry of mathematical ideas. The knowledge developed can be transferred to other number systems and in particular to the decimal system, thus contributing to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of number representations and arithmetic.

The new reality brought about by digital technologies is characterized by new qualities, new opportunities for action, new community affordances, that are captures by the term onlife. This term was initially proposed in the Onlife Manifesto and used in this paper to signify certain qualities that are important in understanding modern digital platforms and applications as well as guide the efforts for effectively extending to provide new capabilities to their users. Specific design principles are presented exemplified by the presentation of the design of a Community of Practice for teachers involved in the pilot activities of the Erasmus+ project TIM - Theatre in Mathematics that promote the adoption of Theatre in teaching Mathematics in Primary and Lower Secondary Education targeting 8-14 years old students.

Block-C is a block-based programming learning tool for C programming language that uses the recognition over recall approach on top of the rigid and complex constructs of C language. It empowers students to learn programming by guiding them to focus on the programming logic rather than the syntax of C language. Novice programmers in introductory programming courses are more productive with the use of Block-C than with regular textual C programming. They can internalize the programming concepts more easily by gradually assigning meaning to the visual models (pertaining to the programming logic) created using the tool. In lab or tutorial sessions, where the presence of facilitators is limited, Block-C can guide the students to complete their assignments easily and effectively. Finally, Block-C promotes the transition to the regular textual C programming by allowing the students to export their code and see how their block-based programs are translated to textual C, but also how textual C is translated to block-based C.

New Media Arts offer opportunities to establish an inclusive educational framework that enables teachers to design and implement project-based learning scenarios where students can engage in deep learning through the preparation, production and refinement of digital artworks resulting in the creation of animated digital stories. The paper presents a combination of New Media Arts with traditional media via eShadow, a dramatized digital storytelling platform inspired by the rich tradition of shadow theatre that enables game-like interventions combining several digital tools for the production of digital stories covering all five phases of filmmaking: scenario development, pre-production, production, post-production and distribution. eShadow can be used (a) to create digital shadow puppets, and (b) to set up, perform and record the scenes of the digital story (production phase). This way, digital story creation is wrapped around interesting game-like decisions, playful improvisations and creative learning. Using eShadow, an intensive project-based learning intervention was undertaken at the Professional Lyceum of Eleftherios Venizelos in Chania for the students of the specialization in “Systems, Applications and Networks” of the Informatics sector where several courses related to the technical background of New Media Arts production are taught: Multimedia Applications, Graphical Programming, Structured Programming and Principles of Digital Technologies.

Coursevo (http://coursevo.com/) is a multilingual multimedia information system for managing courses, supporting learning processes and learning communities through the Web. Its multi-tenant architecture supports multiple instances of the underlying server infrastructure using the same core to serve the needs of multiple communities. An advantage of Coursevo in comparison with other eLearning systems is the emphasis that is given in the use of multimedia as a powerful learning means. Learning activities using multiple media can be more effective than doing it through a single medium (such as text), but what is important is combining media effectively. Coursevo is used in several vocational training and life-long-learning initiatives targeting engineers to establish and continuously support Communities of Practice (CoP). A CoP is a group of people who share an interest, a craft, and/or a profession. The group can evolve naturally because of the members' common interest in a particular domain or area, or it can be created specifically with the goal of gaining knowledge related to their field. We present the establishment of four training frameworks for establishing and supporting distributed CoP across European countries: (1) Computer Science teachers using Python in their courses; (2) Teachers using Arts in teaching all school subjects; (3) Civil protection Communities of Practice; and (4) Communities of Practice in Mechatronics.

Spatiotemporal processes are a generic model for representing various types of content knowledge of physical processes like the ones studied in geosciences, life sciences and diverse specializations of engineering. There is a need to model such content knowledge in a systematic way and provide open exploration environments for learners to interact with the defined spatiotemporal models. ViSTPro provides a generic infrastructure that addresses these needs of science and engineering education, thus fostering active explorations of spatiotemporal processes as rich scenarios authored by educators and offered to learners through a web-based player. Playing a scenario involves graphic representation of formations, movements and interactions on Google maps. Learners interact with graphical entities in an intuitive manner. In contrast, traditional ways of learning depend upon a painful and difficult process to develop abstract mental images with no real-world direct mapping. Using ViSTPro, learners can watch the representation of the processes' evolution in space and time, and actively intervene. To demonstrate the flexibility of ViSTPro and its capability to provide insightful visualizations, a pilot application is elaborated focusing on emergency situations and events with the aim to support the training of civil protection professionals and volunteers. This application enables innovative training methods, through the use of Google maps and complex scenarios pertaining to spatiotemporal processes that model the phenomena under consideration as well as linking to important information that is represented through ViSTPro semantic maps.

The creation of personalized learning experiences is considered as a necessity to cope with the overwhelming amount of available learning material. This paper presents a personalization framework and an algorithm that allows for the creation of pedagogically sound learning experiences taking into account the variety of the learners and their individual needs.

eLearning applications are immensely more valuable when they can use the wealth of information that exists in multimedia digital libraries. However, digital libraries and their standards developed independently on eLearning applications and their standards. It is crucial to bridge the interoperability gap between digital libraries and eLearning applications in order to enable the construction of eLearning applications that easily exploit digital library contents. We present ASIDE, an integrated architecture that supports interoperability between digital libraries and eLearning applications. The architecture is service oriented and supports multiple contexts and views of the digital objects of a library. These views can be utilized by eLearning applications of the digital library for the automatic construction of personalized learning experiences selecting learning objects from the reusable objects of the digital library

A great challenge in information visualization today is to provide models and software that effectively integrate the graphics content of scenes with domain-specific knowledge so that the users can effectively query, interpret, personalize and manipulate the visualized information [1]. Moreover, it is important that the intelligent visualization applications are interoperable in the semantic web environment and thus, require that the models and software supporting them integrate state-of-the-art international standards for knowledge representation, graphics and multimedia. In this paper, we present a model, a methodology and a software framework for the semantic web (Intelligent 3D Visualization Platform - I3DVP) for the development of interoperable intelligent visualization applications that support the coupling of graphics and virtual reality scenes with domain knowledge of different domains. The graphics content and the semantics of the scenes are married into a consistent and cohesive ontological model while at the same time knowledge- based techniques for the querying, manipulation, and semantic personalization of the scenes are introduced. We also provide methods for knowledge driven information visualization and visualization- aided decision making based on inference by reasoning.

The term t-learning refers to interactive access of video-rich learning materials, primarily within the home, through a digital TV set-top box. The effective development of t-learning systems and applications should be based on existing standardization efforts in the fields of digital TV and e-learning. In this paper we examine the compatibility between the international standard for digital TV (TV-Anytime) and the international standard for e-learning (SCORM). The purpose is to provide a methodology for interoperability between educational applications in digital TV environments and to facilitate the creation of educational metadata for digital TV programs. The approach is also applicable in audiovisual digital libraries providing educational services to their users. We also describe an implementation of the mapping between the two standards. The implementation allows the transformation of TV-Anytime metadata to SCO metadata for the creation of SCORM compatible courses that utilize educational material from TV programs.

The proliferation of interoperability e-learning specifications raises the need of extending existing e-learning platforms so that they can be used efficiently in a distributed environment where material producers, service providers and users (either learners or teachers) exchange information using standard models. This extension is essential to preserve digital learning material and retain the user groups and learning communities already set up. We present a generic architecture and its prototype implementation for addressing this need. This architecture is based on the two assumptions that: (1) the preexistent e-learning platform is implemented on top of a relational database management system, and (2) the interoperability model to be supported is SCORM. The prototype implementation uses a Web-based e-learning platform based on a solid pedagogical framework.