The use of virtual simulations is increasingly seen as an opportunity to provide safe training environments. It could provide pre-service teachers with unique opportunities to experience examples of classroom life in a controlled and structured. However, some authors pointed that usability tests are necessary to achieve effective e-learning systems. This paper presents the usability testing of Didascalia Virtual-ClassRoom, an immersive virtual reality system to enhance preservice Secondary school teachers’ communicative competence in classroom climate management. Using the technology acceptance model, we analyzed the responses of 62 users (schoolteachers, counselors and preservice teachers) from Madrid and Barcelona that participated on the experiment. Qualitatively, participants discussed perceived usefulness, as well as positive and negative emotional reactions, which may act as additional facilitators and inhibitors to technology adoption. Based on our findings, we considered that this tool could provide a safe scenario to implement the much-needed practical training, in which preservice teachers can experiment and reflect on their ability to manage the classroom climate. Improvements to the tool are suggested to optimize its functionality, as well as some ideas for its introduction in preservice teacher training.

COVID-19 has brought about a sharp increase in the use of videoconferencing tools. In education, this complicates the monitoring of student experience, which is essential to perform adequate classroom management. Researchers have designed tools to aid teachers within on-site settings, but they focus only on student engagement and are not suitable for virtual environments.In this paper, we present our system’s architecture and evaluation. First, we adapted a theater-based framework to measuring audience experience beyond engagement in online settings. Secondly, we designed a proof-of-concept computer vision system and a companion video conferencing tool to automatically measure audience experience in the classroom and present near real-time feedback. We also describe the experiment we conducted to obtain a dataset to test our system and present the results. Although the predictive accuracy of our proof-of-concept system is limited, it opens several directions for future research.

This paper addresses the use of Virtual Reality (VR) in the training of Secondary Education teachers in Spain as an integral part of the new ecology of learning and proposes some premises from which to design a training program to improve teachers' communicative competence and their ability to manage conflict affecting the classroom climate. First, the paper explains the experiential and experimental potential in which VR immerses us, its ability to create challenging and personalized virtual worlds, as well as the possibility to generate instant feedback and feedforward. Finally, an example of a prototype scenario designed on this conceptual basis is provided and some ideas are discussed to introduce VR into initial teacher training.

The National Ballet of Spain, the most important Spanish dance company in the world, has been trying for years to attract a younger audience in order to ensure its future. To this end, the Ballet published a series of pedagogical booklets that summarize some of their most emblematic performances. This paper presents “BNE nos cuenta” (BNE Tells Us a Story), a pedagogical pilot project that adds an augmented reality application to those booklets, allowing “live” visualizations of the dances. This project aims to be the starting point to measure the effectiveness of the augmented reality as a tool for attracting new young audiences.

Oratory or the art of public speaking with eloquence has been cultivated since ancient times. However, the fear of speaking in public -a disproportionate reaction to the threatening situation of facing an audience-affects a very important part of the population. This work arises from the need to help alleviate this fear through a tool where to train the ability of public speaking. To this purpose, we built a virtual reality system that offers the speaker a safe environment to practice presentations. Since the audience is the only way to receive feedback when giving a speech, our system offers a virtual audience that reacts and gives real-time feedback based on the emotions conveyed by three parameters: voice tone, speech content and speaker's gaze. In this paper, we detail the modelling of the audience just focusing on the speakers' voice tone: 1) by presenting an algorithm that controls the audience' reactions based on the emotions beamed by the speaker, and 2) by carrying out an experiment comparing the reactions generated by the agents with those of a real audience to the same speech, in order to refine the given algorithm.

The increasing in the average age of performing arts audiences is a worldwide problem. If we focus on Spanish dance, the problem becomes more serious. Several studies alert that the dance situation in Spain is critical: the number of spectators in this discipline has been decreasing in the last ten years, reducing its numbers by a half in this period. On the other hand, there is an incipient current that advocates the use of new technologies-especially, videogames - to attract young audiences. This article details the creation process of "Dancing a treasure", an educational videogame aiming to motivate the youngsters towards the Spanish dance. First, we discuss the Application Domain Research Document (ADR Document), a design document to help new researchers by shortening designing times in similar projects. Next, we detail the videogame design decisions based on the lessons learned from the ADR phase. Finally, we argue the most important points of the development and production phase. This work aims to set a precedent for the design and development of videogames based on performing arts, simplifying the work of other developers facing a similar project.

This paper presents our perspective on serious games, covering relevant aspects of the current situation and what we consider are the key elements to be developed over the next few years. Serious games have undergone a long journey from niche research to application in real settings, coming closer to the generalization of games in mainstream education. We describe some of the lines of research we consider more relevant for completing this journey.

There is an increasing interest in providing Computer Science (CS) instruction to a wider sector of the population. On the one hand, it would be convenient to include CS instruction in higher education beyond engineering disciplines, since CS has become a powerful catalyzer for development of society, and therefore the need for a workforce with solid CS background is growing. On the other hand, it would be beneficial to bring CS instruction to primary and secondary education, used as a vehicle to increase interest in CS and capture talent for STEM disciplines from early stages. However, successful delivery of CS instruction to a wide audience is a challenge. Game-based learning is one of the most promising approaches at the moment, since they have the power to appeal to wider audiences. In this paper we identify the need to find more scalable game-based instruction paradigms that can be easily adapted to variable levels of complexity and contents related to CS. We present a flexible and scalable game architecture, and a game model to create videogames for learning CS languages, along with a game engine developed as a reference implementation. The game model focuses on level-based games where the student has to introduce short text fragments or programs to solve each of the levels. This game model is consistent to others found in the literature (Scratch, Logo, etc.) that have proven it effective, since it allow students to discover programming in a self-exploratory way, using their own intuition and learning from their mistakes. Our approach is scalable because (1) it separates the CS language used to write the programs from the game design, allowing reusing the games with different CS markup or programming languages; and (2) it provides a system of levels that allows incremental learning of CS language structures. The approach was tested by developing "Lost in space", an educational game for learning XML. In this game, students control a spaceship, and their goal is to reach a safe point in each of the levels. They provide instructions to the ship with short programs that they write using XML-based instructions. At the beginning students can use a small set of instructions. As they master these types of instructions, new ones become available, supporting in this manner scaffolded learning. The game was tested with undergraduate students from computer science and social sciences, by comparing it with traditional instruction (i.e. lecture). Students who played the game were much more engaged than those who attended the lecture, showing a more active attitude along the whole experience and also spent more time practicing after class. Findings also suggest that the game was effective for instruction regardless of the background of the students. However, the educational gain observed with the game-based instructional approach, even effective, was not significantly higher than traditional instruction. We think that our approach is adequate to introduce CS languages in general, as well as new programming languages.