The integration of serious educational games in Virtual Reality (VR) in schools is rising due to their high interactivity and the incorporation of entertainment into education, a trend that may result in more interest and participation among students. However, teachers often face challenges when using these tools due to their limited knowledge. To address this issue, we developed a qualification workshop to teach primary school teachers how to apply Computational Thinking to create educational games in VR. This work outlines the creation and implementation of the workshop and discusses the results obtained through observation and participant feedback. The findings show that the workshop structure was effective and suggest some adjustments for future interactions. Additionally, the participants completed the workshop and were able to design educational games relevant to their teaching areas.

The education of autistic children is highly challenging and has been calling the attention of different types of professionals to offer solutions capable of helping in the education of these children. One of the most promising possibilities is the use of gameful approaches (e.g., serious games, simulators, and gamification) in the teaching of autistic children. However, despite the recent efforts, it is difficult to understand how these approaches have been developed and applied. To face this problem, we conducted a systematic mapping investigating the design and application of gameful approaches for the education of autistic children. The main results indicate a predominance in the use of 2D games for personal computers, focusing on the contexts of nature, home, and city, analyzed by qualitative approaches. Our study mainly contributes to the areas of educational technologies, mental health, and game-based learning, by providing a general view and a research agenda on the design, use, and evaluation of gameful approaches in the educational process of autistic children.

In the mining industry, belt conveyors are essential for transporting large quantities of materials efficiently and inexpensively. The rollers are one of the main components of a belt conveyor. Their maintenance and operation are critical for material transportation during the mining activities. Despite that, its inspection has been done in the same way for almost 20 years, with little technological innovation. The inspection of the belt conveyor rollers automatically via object detection and thermal imaging can improve this process. Therefore, we propose a new system capable of running the detection of defective rollers in real time and with better precision and recall metrics than those of previous works. We based the object detection models on the YOLOv2 deep learning architecture. Comparing our results with previous work, we observe reductions on false discovery and false negative rates of 52.46% and 61.03%, respectively. We also evaluated three computing infrastructures, and the GPU-based one was the only that enabled real-time performance.

Summary The middleware solutions for General‐Purpose Distributed Computing (GPDC) have distinct requirements, such as task scheduling, processing/storage fault tolerance, code portability for parallel or distributed environments, simple deployment (including over grid or multi‐cluster environments), collaborative development, low code refactoring, native support for distributed data structures, asynchronous task execution, and support for distributed global variables. These solutions do not integrate these requirements into a single deployment with a unique API exposing most of these requirements to users. The consequence is the utilization of several solutions with their particularities, thus requiring different user skills. Besides that, the users have to solve the integration and all heterogeneity issues. To reduce this integration gap, in this paper, we present Java Cá&Lá (JCL), a distributed‐shared‐memory and task‐oriented lightweight middleware for the Java community that separates business logic from distribution issues during the development process and incorporates several requirements that were presented separately in the GPDC middleware literature over the last few decades. JCL allows building distributed or parallel applications with only a few portable API calls, thus reducing the integration problems. Finally, it also runs on different platforms, including small single‐board computers. This work compares and contrasts JCL with other Java middleware systems and reports experimental evaluations of JCL applications in several distinct scenarios.

A wide variety of wearables are now being sold on the market. Improvements in hardware performance and miniaturization allowed the creation of new advanced devices. Despite this focus on hardware optimization, the software part may also have an essential role inside wearables continuous development. There is a need to understand the main impacts of operating systems in this ecosystem, particularly on performance aspects. This work presents a functional comparison between some of the most common operating systems used by wearables. In the absence of a standardized benchmark, authors have created a set of evaluations to figure out the system with the best performance. Results presented at the end helps to determine the best operating system in each scenario, forcing designers and developers to choose the software solution taking into account this environment-specific features.

The evolution and dissemination of network communication technology and the advanced status of embedded devices encourage the creation of solutions for monitoring cities in various environments. End-users can benefit from applications that deliver information in real time. On the other hand, administrating these applications is not a trivial task. Components may fail and invalidate an application. In this essay we present IDEAL-TRAFFIC: a framework based on SOA architecture with modules to manage the state of the service. IDEAL-TRAFFIC provides a simple interface that enables the system administrator to create applications and to make them available to the user. A self-adaptation process is necessary in order to ensure quality of services. In order to maximize resources usage, a process of readaptation is embedded. These approaches follow the rules of the application's requirements and do not depend on human intervention.