Augmented Reality (AR) is increasingly being used in educational settings due to its potential to provide an interactive, engaging and immersive experience, helping users gain a better understanding of complex concepts. This study evaluates the impact of gamification on ePhosAR, an AR application designed to introduce the field of photonics to students. Two versions of the application were compared: a non-gamified and a gamified version. The gamified version includes elements such as a virtual assistant, a progress bar and badges. A within-subjects evaluation with undergraduate participants measured usability, engagement, and motivation using validated questionnaires and qualitative feedback. The findings suggest that gamification enhances user engagement and motivation while maintaining usability. These results contribute to understanding the role of gamification in AR educational tools, supporting its potential for STEM education and interactive learning design.

Serious games are games that prioritize objectives other than amusement, enjoyment, or fun. In recent years, serious games have experienced substantial development, leading to an increasing number of articles that aim to classify them based on various features. An often employed criterion for categorizing serious games is their environment, which refers to whether they are 2D (two-dimensional), 3D (three-dimensional), or a combination of both. This study presents an instructional game called HALT, which was developed in both a 2D and 3D setting, and later evaluated by several users. The evaluation sought to identify any notable disparities in the learners' degree of enjoyment when interacting with the two versions of the game. Furthermore, the study investigates the correlation between individuals' frequency of participation in digital games and the two possible gaming settings. The sample comprises 82 participants who are undergraduate students enrolled in the computer science department. The statistical analysis indicated a substantial difference in enjoyment scores between the 2D and 3D versions of the game. However, enjoyment levels were consistent among groups identified by the frequency of playing games. Next phases involve obtaining a more varied sample and a comparative analysis of the games based on users' acquired knowledge.

The ePhos project addresses the need to inspire the next generation in photonics, a transformative field shaping various aspects of our lives. Comprising a community of practice and a mobile augmented reality (AR) application named ePhosAR. These tools provide free and accessible photonics educational material for diverse audiences. The community of practice fosters collaborative learning through educational material, while the ePhosAR app, leveraging AR technology, transforms theoretical concepts into engaging experiences. The app is also accompanied by a board game for interactive learning. The dissemination efforts conducted at schools and universities received quite positive feedback, affirming the project's potential. The objectives of ePhos tools are to make photonics education easy, enjoyable, and accessible. Future work involves enriching and researching the tools' effectiveness in photonics education.

The agility ladder is a simple piece of fitness equipment that meets modern sports requirements by developing agility, stability, rhythm, change of direction and rapid foot movement. The proposed project is applying IoT technology to upgrade the conventional agility ladder into an interactive training tool (called “Smart Ladder”). Smart Ladder is exploiting IoT technology (i.e., sensors) and digital apps to support real-time interaction with the users. Every time the user (athlete) executes a drill workout and he/she touches a step of the Smart Ladder which is a mistake, a relevant signal is produced by the IoT sensors. The Smart Ladder provides real-time feedback about the athlete’s performance, which is displayed on the trainer’s personal computer, tablet or mobile phone. Moreover, if the athlete makes a mistake, Smart Ladder provides real-time feedback to both the athlete and his/her coach. The main goal of this study is to present the Smart Ladder as well as the improvement of coaching and athletes’ training. The evaluation activities showed positive results in relation to ease of use, usefulness, ease of learning and the satisfaction (means >= 5.83). Furthermore, the experimental group utilizing the Smart Ladder showed a significant improvement in 20 - meter run and broad jump and a significant decrease in the number of mistakes made regarding the two-foot forward exercise (p=.00 <.05).

Technical skills are insufficient to gain employment in big organizations and in-demand professions in the current labor market. Current and aspiring firm executives place a significant focus on the development of soft skills since they are crucial to work performance. To improve the soft and hard skills of students through the usage of a learning management system in their lessons, a gamification framework must be developed. To do this, skills are categorized into four distinct groups: Communication, Punctuality, Information and Digital Literacy, and Professionalism. A grading rubric is intended to assist the framework in assigning points to users based on their engagement with the learning management system. Each skill will be awarded between 0 and 3 points according the grading rubric. To encourage students to engage more with the system, conventional gamification components are included. Future milestones involve the development of a digital wallet to store the framework's acquired badges.

This paper introduces a contemporary platform, called FGAWeb, that can be utilized in order to administrate flexible games. FGAWeb platform is focused on differentiating the content of puzzle and quiz games in order to make them more suitable for use in educational settings. Instructors can utilize this platform in order to create and edit game activities as well as, to have access to game and learning analytics. FGAWeb platform offers an API that makes the whole system accessible from any game engine that supports the HTTP protocol for data transfers.

This study investigates the integration of a 3D Collaborative Game into the learning process of a Marketing lesson. The research conducted in the context of a collaboration between two universities. Students from one university facilitated the game activity whereas the others played the game. The evaluation methodology was focused on users' satisfaction, intension - purpose and attitude towards the game activity as well as on the motivational impact of the activity to the students who supported it. The preliminary results of the evaluation were promising and revealed that there is a great interest from the side of the learners towards the use of games in the learning process.

This paper examines the impact of an pedagogical agent (PA), in a 3D collaborative educational game in the virtual environment of OpenSim platform. The main goal of this paper is to evaluate the impact of a pedagogical agent to 3D collaborative game based learning by developing an agent that interacts with the students both at team and personal level. In order to enhance the already implemented 3D game functions, a pedagogical agent that supports students during the game learning process was implemented. The evaluation approach attempts to investigate the impact of PAs in 3D collaborative educational games focusing on two dimensions: a) on PAs usefulness in collaborative 3D games and b) on students' teams performance in the game learning process. This research concludes that the intervention of pedagogical agent's assistance in the game has a strong positive impact on teams performance and can be considered as useful in collaborative serious games.

This study investigates whether 3D collaborative games can promote the collaboration between students. The participants of the study were 27 undergraduate students in tertiary education, aged 19-22 years old. The intervention lasted 12 weeks and it was based on the One Group Pretest, Post test experimental design. The game used for the intervention was configurable, providing the ability for changes to its content, and it was developed in the OpenSim platform. The data collection was made with the use of a paper-based questionnaire and the statistical analysis was conducted using paired-samples t-test. The results of the analysis were promising and showed that educational games can promote collaborative interactions between students and improve their social skills.

The current paper presents a case study for evaluating an interaction analysis tool called GIANT, which was developed in order to support collaborative activities in educational blogs. The paper focuses mainly on the perspective of the students, and examines the hypothesis that, educational blogs in combination with the GIANT tool could support participants in improving their learning process by monitoring the social interactions in blog-based learning activities. Overall, students were to a large extent satisfied with their blogging experience with GIANT rating the tool as user-friendly and easy-to-use. Moreover, evaluation findings indicate that the presence of the interaction analysis graphs from GIANT was regarded as positive by the students, functioned as a motive for increasing their blog participation.

This paper presents the design, implementation and educational use of a virtual learning environment which supports children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to learn to solve social problems presented in the format of Social Stories. The pilot evaluation revealed that the environment has the potential to be a beneficial and easy-to-use educational tool for teaching social problem solving to children with ASD.

Blogging is quite popular and group blogging has interesting potential for collaborative learning. This paper investigates the possibility of implementing Interaction Analysis techniques in educational group-blogging systems, as a tool for supporting teachers especially for engineering education. The main objective of the pilot study is to provide evidence that teachers could be facilitated, in the process of evaluating and assessing students' interaction and participation, through an Interaction Analysis plugin developed for the WordPress blogging platform. Overall, preliminary findings indicate that the prototype WordPress plugin and its integrated Interaction Analysis indicators, described in this paper, can significantly assist teachers in evaluating collaborative learning activities under the scope of engineering education.

This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a three dimensional collaborative knowledge game, called "GrAFiCA", that utilizes the Second Life collaborative virtual environment. The presented study is part of a larger research project focusing on designing and evaluating game based learning in virtual worlds. Our aim is to investigate the effectiveness of three dimensional game-based learning techniques through a detailed collaborative game scenario, at the level of tertiary education.

The goal of this paper is to determine how the effective design principles of popular video game franchises can be adopted and adapted in order to enhance the students' educational experience in 3D virtual Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environments. This paper also analyzes how combining the fundamental characteristics of video games and gamer personalities may allow instructional developers and teachers to explore exciting new opportunities for collaborative learning on the Web and within 3D CSCL environments.

This paper proposes virtual metaphors, appearance features, gestures and animations that can be used for avatars in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning three dimensional Environments. Our aim is to enrich avatars' support to nonverbal communication, as well as to enhance and improve students' collaborative interaction. Within this context, by implementing virtual avatars representations and “non real” world existing tools in Second Life, we conducted a case study at the level of tertiary education.

Computer technology seems to be very useful to support collaborative learning scenarios and thus Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. The main goal of this paper is to compare two of the most promising Collaborative Virtual Environment platforms, namely Croquet and Second Life, in terms of their potential to support collaborative e-learning scenarios among geographically separated users. Both platforms are examined by validating the platforms’ features, philosophy and policies against some basic design principles for collaborative virtual learning environments in order to better assess their design adequacy for online learning. Finally, this paper presents the user evaluation results, which was conducted by undergraduate students in order to assess the potential of both platforms for supporting collaborative e-learning scenarios.

The partitioning constitutes one of the basic problems that need to be handled in distributed virtual environments for maintaining consistency among users' view of the virtual scene and for optimizing the performance of the system. This paper presents an approach for handling the partitioning problem, which is based on objects' attributes. In particular, the approach proposes a technique, which takes into account the degree of interaction that the objects of the virtual environment carry for predicting future avatar behavior. This prediction of avatars' behavior based on objects ' attributes defines the initial partitioning of the virtual space.

This paper proposes a business model for the successful operation of the currently developing broadband metropolitan area networks in Greece. Having recorded and examined relevant international practices, we describe in detail the way that these networks should be managed, operated, maintained and expanded. Taking into consideration that these infrastructures will alter the broadband map of Greece widely, that Greece currently has one of the lowest broadband penetration percentages in Europe and that the proper exploitation of the networks to be deployed could boost the demand for broadband connections and applications, the proposition of the business model appears to be of vital importance. We present the proposed business model in detail including information regarding network management and network expansion of the broadband metropolitan networks and viability issues regarding the authority which will manage the broadband metropolitan networks.

Distributed virtual environments tend to become a de facto solution for large-scale networked virtual environments. One of the key issues and problems that need to be handled in the design of a scalable and effective distributed virtual environment system is the partitioning problem, which refers to the efficient assignment of the system's workload to the available resources of the system. This paper presents an object driven partitioning approach based on the partitioning algorithm of Lui & Chan, who proposed a three step technique for balancing the workload among the servers of the Distributed Virtual Environment.

Abstract In this paper, we present a framework that integrates three‐dimensional (3D) mesh streaming and compression techniques and algorithms into our EVE‐II networked virtual environments (NVEs) platform, in order to offer support for large‐scale environments as well as highly complex world geometry. This framework allows the partial and progressive transmission of 3D worlds as well as of separate meshes, achieving reduced waiting times for the end‐user and improved network utilization. We also present a 3D mesh compression method focused on network communication, which is designed to support progressive mesh transmission, offering a fast and effective means of reducing the storage and transmission needs for geometrical data. This method is integrated in the above framework and utilizes prediction to achieve efficient lossy compression of 3D geometry. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this paper, we present the design principles for virtual spaces and two different tools as solutions for supporting e-collaboration and multi-user communication in Web-based learning communities. The first solution, called Virtual Conference, is designed and implemented in the framework of the VirRAD European project. It is a two-dimensional space where participants represented by their photos can use various e-collaboration tools. The second solution, called EVE Training Area, is a three-dimensional space where participants, represented by 3D humanoid avatars, can use a variety of e-collaboration tools. This paper describes the functionality provided by both tools, compares them, and proposes cases for exploiting each solution.

This paper presents the current state of the art in Web3d multi-user technologies and more specifically networked virtual environment platforms that support the X3D standard, which are currently limited in number, and also the existing X3D browsers that enable these applications. Furthermore, this paper presents the architecture of a platform, called EVE, which was developed to support multi-user virtual environments and was initially based on VRML, as well as the implementation regarding the process of upgrading this platform in order to fully support the X3D standard, using the open-source Xj3D library. Finally, the benefits of shifting to the X3D standard are presented, and some of the problems that currently exist are discussed.

We discuss the development of virtual communities and especially e-learning communities. In particular, we are inspired by VirRAD European project, and we present the intermediate results that have raised from the definition of this virtual radiopharmacy community.

The growing need for communication, visualization and organization technologies in the field of e-learning environments has led to the application of virtual reality and the use of collaborative virtual environments. The paper presents a system architecture to support such environments, defined by user needs and using state of the art technologies.

Shared or networked virtual environments are one of the most promising uses of the virtual reality technology. While a lot of research has been done in the area of multi-user virtual environments corresponding to the sharing of events very few research has been done on specific services and functionality. However both the requirements and the kind of the offered services affect significantly the design of a system. In this paper we present the main issues in the design of a platform to support the distant education process using networked virtual environments. We also introduce the term Educational Virtual Environments and their basic requirements. According to these requirements of the educational virtual environments we propose both a suitable architecture and a protocol for the interaction between the components of this architecture.