The prevalence of obesity among adolescents and adults in the U.S. is a matter of concern. Exercise video games reach a wide audience and can be used to motivate increased physical activity. We have previously developed Astrojumper, an exergame exploring game mechanics that provide a fun experience and effective exercise, and have now developed a new version of Astrojumper that supports interval training through additional mechanics. We believe the new version will improve upon the first in player motivation, enjoyment and replayability, and also in the level of physical challenge the game affords its players.

Today's Millennial students have changing preferences for education and work environments that negatively affect their enrollment and retention rates into university computer science programs. To better suit these preferences, and to improve CS educational techniques, teaching methods and tools outside of the traditional lecture sessions and textbooks must be explored and implemented. Currently, both serious games and collaborative classroom work, including pair programming, are the focus of studies meant to do just this. The proposed work deals with both serious games and student collaboration research, positing that educational games with collaborative elements (multiplayer games) will take advantage of the benefits offered by each of these areas, resulting in an educational game that demonstrates increased learning gains and student engagement above that of individual learning game experiences. Collaborative educational games and software also have the potential to solve many of the problems that collaborative work may pose to course instructors in terms of helping to regulate and evaluate student performance.

Children with autism show substantial benefits from rigorous physical activity, however it is often difficult to motivate these individuals to exercise due to their usually sedentary lifestyles. To address the problem of motivation, we have developed Astrojumper, a stereoscopic virtual reality exergame which was designed to fit the needs of children with autism. During the game, virtual space-themed objects fly forward toward the user who must use their own physical movements to avoid collisions. Preliminary playtesting of Astrojumper on neuro-typical participants has been positive, and we plan to run an extensive evaluation assessing the psychological and physiological effects of this system on children with and without autism.

This paper presents the design of the final stage of a new game currently in development, entitled cMotion, which will use virtual humans to teach emotion recognition and programming concepts to children. Having multiple facets, cMotion is designed to teach the intended users how to recognize facial expressions and manipulate an interactive virtual character using a visual drag-and-drop programming interface. By creating a game which contextualizes emotions, we hope to foster learning of both emotions in a cultural context and computer programming concepts in children. The game will be completed in three stages which will each be tested separately: a playable introduction which focuses on social skills and emotion recognition, an interactive interface which focuses on computer programming, and a full game which combines the first two stages into one activity.