The use of video games as an educational tool is gaining in popularity. The concept of serious games, which combine playful elements to foster learning, has been widely proven to be addictive. The ability of serious games to improve problem-solving, promote the acquisition of knowledge and skills, and foster involvement and motivation are key elements that make them effective educational tools in various fields. The contribution presents the prototype Dorobot, a serious game developed with a dual purpose: to improve students’ programming and problem-solving skills and in the meanwhile to promote awareness of environmental sustainability. The game is addressed to students in early grades of secondary schools and the pilot study yielded encouraging results regarding user appreciation and effectiveness in learning acquisition.

The use of technology to support collaborative tasks and learning is at present one of the central themes of research into computer education. Recent experiences have demonstrated that computer-mediated peer interaction is in some contexts more effective than face-to-face communication. The present work aims to make a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the peer-to-peer communication fostered by the use of a Web-based environment to support cooperative learning of geometry. In line with other experiences conducted internationally, our results confirm that the use of technological support to stimulate communication has positive effects not only on the quality of the interaction but also on the quality of the learning gain of the individual members making up the cooperative community.

Today, there is growing interest in the use of Internet and WWW to achieve cooperative type activities and in particular, cooperative learning, based on the principles of constructivism. Cooperation can undoubtedly enhance network-mediated instructional systems but efficacious cooperative learning can be ensured providing these systems with components that reproduce well-established pedagogical models of cooperative learning, together with components that can assess both individual and group progress. This is made possible by introducing AI techniques in computer-aided learning systems that allow pedagogical strategies to be embedded. In this work, the authors present a system on the WWW for cooperative learning about geometric figures, where each student communicates with the rest of the group online, and a study to evaluate the cooperative learning effectiveness of our project called Geometriamo. The system is based on Slavin's Student Team Learning model for cooperative learning.