There is a need to increase the number of students, especially women, choosing programming and STEM disciplines. We need innovative approaches in schools to better engage students and awake their interest in computer science. This paper addresses the need to create tools that effectively support the learning of programming and the development of computational thinking, highlighting why video games can be an effective educational tool for it and also attract new students to STEM. The Game4Coding Erasmus+ project proposes the design of a video game called CodeQuest, using a game genre that has not been frequently used before to address the teaching of programming, the monster tamer genre. We consider that video games have a number of benefits such as that stimulate active learning, are engaging for a wide range of students, and present information in a way that is attractive to learners. We want to explore this kind of game's effectiveness as a learning tool as well as its effect on the perception of STEM disciplines and programming to attract new public to coding (especially girls).

How do students use artificial intelligence tools in coursework projects when given the liberty to do so, with the only requirement of documenting how, where and why? We describe experiences with two groups of undergraduates in courses related to serious game authoring and human-computer interaction, both carried out in the second semester of 2023. In the serious games course, students were given the option of following a teacher-developed methodology for generating graphical assets for their serious games using a set of generative AI tools. This methodology was explained in the class but not hands on lab was carried out. In the interaction course, students were free to choose which AI tools to use when designing their system or in the development of their project documentation. Despite the limited number of participants (41 in total) we can see very different views and degrees of involvement: while some tried to use AI for as many tasks as possible, others considered that the learning curve for those tools was too steep to be worthwhile. Both experiences included a free-text survey at the end, and taken together, provide insights into how both supervised and unsupervised generative AI use could impact undergraduate projects in similar subjects. In addition to describing how students chose to use the tools, and the main takeaways from their survey response, we also discuss some of the ethical aspects about the access to the tools and what should be the minimal conditions to be met to allow the equitable use of AI in the classroom.

Serious games have several advantages for learning over more traditional activities. One of those advantages is that being highly interactive, they provide a firsthand simulated experience to the users. Serious games can also generate interaction data that can be used to assess learning, both for evaluation and to provide timely feedback for learners or even adapt aspects of the game on the fly. However, this potential is currently far from realized because doing so requires significant investment and expertise as compared to more traditional educational activities. Additionally, game learning analytics continue to be a costly and fragile process. We propose a combination of tools that greatly reduces the associated costs of building serious games with meaningful analytics simplifying the validation of those games and their deployment in real settings. We consider that this can be a key step to building predictive assessment avoiding the need for disruptive external assessment thus bootstrapping serious games to recognize learning through analytics.

Serious games are videogames whose purpose goes beyond mere entertainment. However, serious games use in mainstream education is still limited. The development of serious games is an expensive and complex process that requires the participation of different experts (e.g. domain, educators, graphic artists, and programmers). We consider that new generative AI techniques can help in the prototyping of serious games by reducing and automating some of the processes involved. There is increasing evidence that generative AI techniques such as ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot can increase the productivity of writing or coding tasks respectively. In our case, both prototyping and teaching serious games are complex because of the number and diversity of tasks involved and we are currently investigating whether AI techniques can be used to improve and simplify the process. For example, ChatGPT could support the process of creating the game narrative, and other systems such as Stable Diffusion could ease the creation of some of the graphics resources (e.g., for creating more cohesive and coherent backgrounds). Automating some of the costlier processes of game prototyping can contribute to creating better products by allowing the playtesting of different options for more effective games. As the field of generative AI is in continuous change, this paper presents a working methodology to simplify the development of serious games, that has been instantiated with concrete tools. This working methodology has been piloted effectively by one student from a Master of Design for the development of a serious game and will be tested in a serious games development course. In the article we also explore how these AI techniques can be combined with a game authoring environment such as uAdventure to systematize the development of serious games. The use of Generative AI offers great potential for improving the development of serious games and needs to be further researched alongside its applications for game-based learning education.

The serious game industry has been a subject of interest for the educational community in the last few years. However, despite their potential benefits when compared to traditional e-learning, use of serious games in education has been hampered by difficulties, including that of deploying games in multi-platform settings and leveraging data generated by their players to improve the learning outcomes of those players. This increasing uptake requires to simplify serious games application for both teachers and developers. This paper proposes a standards-based approach to improve serious games deployment and evaluation. Building on existing and upcoming standards will allow games to be seamlessly integrated into the learning management systems that are already present in most higher education institutions. We present initial experiments that put the proposed approach into practice using two specific tools: uAdventure and SIMVA.

Data science applications in education are quickly proliferating, partially due to the use of LMSs and MOOCs. However, the application of data science techniques in the validation and deployment of serious games is still scarce. Among other reasons, obtaining and communicating useful information from the varied interaction data captured from serious games requires specific data analysis and visualization techniques that are out of reach of most non-experts. To mitigate this lack of application of data science techniques in the field of serious games, we present T-Mon, a monitor of traces for the xAPI-SG standard. T-Mon offers a default set of analysis and visualizations for serious game interaction data that follows this standard, with no other configuration required. The information reported by T-Mon provides an overview of the game interaction data collected, bringing analysis and visualizations closer to non-experts and simplifying the application of serious games.

This is an Innovative Practice Full Paper. Serious Game learning analytics can provide insight to improve both the learning process and the lifecycle of games. Due to the complexity and diversity of topics involved, from game design to implementation to tracing the user, teaching game learning analytics to engineering students is challenging. We have created a teaching approach built on an integrated set of tools to minimize the boilerplate setup and configuration typically required when building game learning analytics from disparate modules. Our approach relies on the combination of an authoring environment that eases the creation of adventure and location-based games, a standards-based interaction tracker, and a cloud-based analytics framework. In this environment, students can design and implement serious games with associated analytics models from the very beginning, allowing them to experiment from early on with analytics to improve their games' lifecycles. We have piloted this approach in two university courses for two years, where students prototyped serious games and then used analytics to understand how their users interacted with their games. The use of analytics helped our students to reflect on and refine their designs. While our approach can be applied with any tools, our authoring environment and analytics tools are available as open-source projects to facilitate development, prototyping, or testing of games with analytics.

Despite the proven benefits of Serious Games when compared to traditional e-learning, uptake of game-based learning in mainstream education is still very low. Increasing uptake requires making suitable games easier to deploy as an activity type in existing e-learning platforms, without compromising game quality or increase development cost; and leveraging data generated by players to improve their learning outcomes. We briefly discuss available e-learning standards to address these issues and describe our current standards-based approach to both game deployment and evaluation (including learning analytics).

The e-UCM group is working to simplify the processes of both creation and scientific validation of educational adventure games, by making the entire process of game creation, data acquisition, and analysis more transparent and integrated. This paper presents the integration of the uAdventure authoring tool with SIMVA, a tool to simplify validation experiments, thus encompassing the full process of serious games authoring and validation.

Serious games have proven several advantages when used in education improving students learning. However, games are still complex to deploy in the class for average teachers. Many teachers still do not see games as a powerful tool to improve their teaching work. To this end, it is essential to humanize the game technology making the use of games more transparent to teachers in a way that they get the benefits and avoid most of the game deployment complexity. We consider that Game Learning Analytics is one of the keys to help teachers in the application of serious games in the classrooms. Game Learning Analytics allows to capture data from students' interactions with games and derive information that simplify teachers' tasks. Doing it in a transparent way within the game environment (i.e. stealth assessment) can provide evidence-based data about the learners' knowledge at each point of time. Combining both game learning analytics in near real-time and offline, and stealth assessment for games, it could be possible to leverage their use in classroom settings at real-time making their use easier for teachers.

Teachers often wish to integrate activities from disparate sources into their courses. For example, gamified activities, mediated through technology, can promote the type of active learning required to develop higher-level engagement by students. However, unless the activities have been designed to facilitate it, integrating their analytics into a single dashboard can require significant development effort. A general solution to such heterogeneous analytics integration can be of great value, by presenting a single view of student actions throughout the different parts of a course. We describe the problems presented when integrating the analytics of three heterogeneous stand-alone activities, in the context of a EU project to improve software engineering teaching. The idea is to increase student engagement via gamification, and explore the design space of possible solutions for providing integrated analytics over the heterogeneous activities. We then describe the design of a proof-of-concept implementation, based on the use of both xAPI trackers and simple CSV files for information exchange, single sign-on, a minimal class management web application, and updates to the analytics platform to allow dynamic changes in the multi-level analysis. The resulting approach can be readily applied to similar heterogeneous scenarios.

Serious games validation is a highly complex and burdensome process. To ensure that games meet their intended educational goals, it is necessary to have a clear experimental design and the necessary tools to minimize the errors that may appear in the process. In this article, after describing the most common problems that we have found while validating our own games, we present Simva, a tool designed to simplify the process of validating serious games with formal questionnaires and relating them with learning analytics data, reducing time, cost, and error rates.

Game engines and developer-friendly authoring tools have greatly simplified entertainment game development. However, this does not extend to serious games which, in particular, require involvement of non-developer stakeholders. We present the first evaluation of uAdventure, an easy-to-use game development environment for narrative point-and-click graphic adventure games. uAdventure is a re-implementation of the previously-validated eAdventure environment on top of the Unity game engine. The idea is to get most of the advantages of the Unity professional environment at a fraction of its complexity, and without requiring programming knowledge to use it. uAdventure include educational-oriented affordances, such as assessment and learning analytics; and has been formatively evaluated by heterogeneous users with different degrees of technical knowledge. The results of our evaluation show much simpler story creation for profiles that had no previous knowledge of the engine, and positive feedback from more technical profiles which would use the tool as a prototyping tool for complex projects.

Game learning analytics has a great potential to provide insight and improve the use of games in different educational situations. However, it is necessary to clearly establish what the learner's requirements are and to set realistic expectations about the learning process and outcomes. Application of game learning analytics requires pedagogically informed policies that settle the learning goals and relate them to analysis and visualization; and a supporting infrastructure that provides the mechanism on top of which it is executed. Both concerns can be addressed separated: on the one hand, there is a Learning Analytics Model (LAM) which describes how the analysis is carried out, interpreted as learning, and presented to stakeholders; and on the other hand, an underlying analytics system that concentrates on performance, security, flexibility and generality. An important advantage of this separation is that it allows LAM authors to concentrate on their area of expertise, limiting their exposition to the actual mechanism used underneath. However, LAMs built for a single game fail to account for the frequent case where games and their analytics are aggregated into larger, overarching plots, games or courses. This work describes an extension to an existing game learning analytics system, used in RAGE and BEACONING H2020 projects, which manages multilevel analytics through improvements to both policy and mechanism; and introduces meta-Learning Analytic Models, which characterize learning in hierarchical structures.

Pervasive gaming has experimented a huge commercial growth with location-based game successes such as Pokémon GO or Ingress. The serious game industry has an opportunity to take advantage of location-based mechanics to better connect games with the real world, creating more authentic immersive learning environments. Games such as historical tours, story-based exploration, laboratories, or flora explorations can greatly benefit from location-based mechanics. Location-based games usually include an augmented map to provide game context, which combines both traditional game-dependent elements such as avatars, and location-based elements such as areas or points of interest. For players, interacting with location-based elements may involve entering or exiting specific areas; or reaching a certain location and looking in a specific direction. To include standards-based learning analytics for location-based serious games (SGs), we have added support for player movement and location-based interactions to the pre-existing xAPI serious game profile. We have validated this approach through a case-study example that guided players through different sports-related facilities within a large outdoor area. This work have been carried out and it is available as part of the analytics infrastructure used in EU H2020 RAGE and BEACONING serious game projects.

Applying games in education provides multiple benefits clearly visible in entertainment games: their engaging, goal-oriented nature encourages students to improve while they play. Educational games, also known as Serious Games (SGs) are video games designed with a main purpose other than pure entertainment; their main purpose may be to teach, to change an attitude or behavior, or to create awareness of a certain issue. As educators and game developers, the validity and effectiveness of these games towards their defined educational purposes needs to be both measurable and measured. Fortunately, the highly interactive nature of games makes the application of Learning Analytics (LA) perfect to capture students' interaction data with the purpose of better understanding or improving the learning process. However, there is a lack of widely adopted standards to communicate information between games and their tracking modules. Game Learning Analytics (GLA) combines the educational goals of LA with technologies that are commonplace in Game Analytics (GA), and also suffers from a lack of standards adoption that would facilitate its use across different SGs. In this paper, we describe two key steps towards the systematization of GLA: 1), the use of a newly-proposed standard tracking model to exchange information between the SG and the analytics platform, allowing reusable tracker components to be developed for each game engine or development platform; and 2), the use of standardized analysis and visualization assets to provide general but useful information for any SG that sends its data in the aforementioned format. These analysis and visualizations can be further customized and adapted for particular games when needed. We examine the use of this complete standard model in the GLA system currently under development for use in two EU H2020 SG projects.

Educational technology is very powerful. It allows not only to overcome distance and time, but also to enhance interaction in face-to-face settings. In this session of the eMadrid network, we will present how educational technology can boost education, not only in the large, but especially in the small, in the classroom. We will also show how one can influence and improve the other.

Educational games (aka serious games, SG) are powerful educational contents. However, they are costly to develop, and once developed, SGs become dependent on software and hardware combinations that may become obsolete, such as Adobe Flash or Java Applets. Addressing these problems would allow a much greater use of SGs in education. The eAdventure authoring tool, developed by the e-UCM research group, addressed high development costs, and resulted in the creation of multiple SGs in collaboration with different institutions. However, eAdventure's Java Applets have become increasingly difficult to run due to platform obsolescence. To maintain the benefits of the eAdventure platform and user base, we have created new platform called uAdventure: an SG editor built on top of the game engine Unity that allows for the creation of educational adventure games without requiring programming. Since Unity is supported on a majority of platforms (including mobile). By developing SGs with uAdventure, the games become future-proof, as they can be updated and retargeted for new platforms as required. In this sense, uAdventure improves the lifecycle of SGs by reducing both authoring and maintenance costs.

Serious Games can benefit from the commercial video games industry by taking advantage of current development tools. However, the economics and requirements of serious games and commercial games are very different. In this paper, we describe the factors that impact the total cost of ownership of serious games used in educational settings, review the specific requirements of games used as learning material, and analyze the different development tools available in the industry highlighting their advantages and disadvantages that must be taken into account when using them to develop a serious game.

The appearance of MOOCs has boosted the creation of educational material for use in all possible contexts. However, this material is often created without much thought and without proper tools and methodologies. Much more attention should be placed on the design of educational material, since this is the basis for a successful learning experience. In this special session, we report about several interesting approaches towards the design and creation of educational material that range from the call to the definition of a discipline of Courseware Engineering, to a methodology for video recording, another one for the creation of smart adaptive content, tools metrics for teaching computational thinking, the integration of OERs, and the design and application of game-based material.

In this paper we analyze the process of designing and developing a Serious Game intended to train people with intellectual disabilities in moving around a city using the public transportation system. The first step in our investigation is to understand the cognitive, psychological and motor abilities of our users and their specific needs. Secondly, we translated the characteristics of the players into user requirements, with adapted mechanics to improve the understanding and to increase the probability for the user to be able to carry out the tasks to perform in the video game. Finally, due to the specific characteristics of our final users a Learning Analytics module has been included in the game to collect relevant information about how users are actually playing and to infer how the learning process of every user is occurring. We also discuss the next steps in our research and the future work related with it: design a range of experimental tests to verify the adequacy of the video game as a learning tool for this type of users.

Our review examines the literature on Serious Games used as learning tools for people with intellectual disabilities. Although intellectual disabilities are a very broad field where each individual has very specific characteristics, it would be beneficial to have general evidence-based recommendations about how to design videogames adapted to their cognitive requirements. Thus, the first step of our investigation is to identify and review the available literature on Serious Games for intellectual disabilities classifying them according to the learning outcomes associated. Search terms identified 43 papers covering this topic and our review presents the initial results. A second aim is to understand the mechanics designed, the methods used in the investigation and the data obtained. The final goal is to identify what is working in this kind of games and how this can be generalized into a methodology to simplify the creation of more effective games for people with intellectual disabilities.

MOOCs are disrupting educational technology by democratizing access to high quality courses offered by some of the most prestigious universities. However, due to low entry cost and multiple other factors, MOOCs suffer from low retention rates: making MOOCs more interactive and engaging is therefore an important goal. Educational games provide environments that mix both immersion and quick feedback cycles, and we consider that games also have the potential to improve interaction and assessment in MOOCs environments; indeed, many game-like simulations have already been successfully applied within MOOCs in domains such as electronic circuits (schematic circuit simulator) and biology (foldit, eyewire). In this work, we analyze multiple such experiences and propose a catalogue of best practices that could contribute to the successful integration of educational games into MOOC platforms.

Massive Online Open Courses are in the process of radically changing the use of technology in education, as measured both by the number of enrolled students and the level of academic excellence of the institutions that are driving their adoption. Typically, online learning management systems have relied on simple questionnaires for feedback and evaluation. On the other hand, MOOC platforms such as EDX have, from the onset, provided a great flexibility in this regard, providing peer grading and several examples of highly interactive activities such as hands-on simulations. This paper explores the integration of serious games as a new type of MOOC activity, providing increased engagement and a valuable source of learning analytics. The inclusion of serious games has implications for both courses and games. Due to the diversity of existing serious game and MOOC platforms, we focus on the specific case of integrating EADVENTURE games into EDX.

In this paper we present our approach to introduce educational videogames as class exercises in face-to-face education. The main objective is to simplify teachers' task when using games by providing real-time information of the actual students' use of the games while in the classroom. The approach is based on defining the educational goals for the exercise/game precisely, designing a game that captures these goals, establishing relations between game interactions and educational goals and finally, create data capturing and visualizations of the relevant information to support the teacher. We applied this approach to a real case study, creating an educational videogame about the XML markup language that substituted the usual exercises in a Web Technologies class. This was tested with 34 computer science students with positive and promising results.

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.

This paper addresses the implications of combining learning analytics and serious games for improving game quality, monitoring and assessment of player behavior, gaming performance, game progression, learning goals achievement, and user's appreciation. We introduce two modes of serious games analytics: in-game (real time) analytics, and post-game (off-line) analytics. We also explain the GLEANER framework for in-game analytics and describe a practical example for off-line analytics. We conclude with a brief outlook on future work, highlighting opportunities and challenges towards a solid uptake of SGs in authentic educational and training settings.

The Learning Analytics (LA) discipline analyzes educational data obtained from student interaction with online resources. Most of the data is collected from Learning Management Systems deployed at established educational institutions. In addition, other learning platforms, most notably Massive Open Online Courses such as Udacity and Coursera or other educational initiatives such as Khan Academy, generate large amounts of data. However, there is no generally agreedupon data model for student interactions. Thus, analysis tools must be tailored to each system's particular data structure, reducing their interoperability and increasing development costs. Some e-Learning standards designed for content interoperability include data models for gathering student performance information. In this paper, we describe how well-known LA tools collect data, which we link to how two e-Learning standards - IEEE Standard for Learning Technology and Experience API - define their data models. From this analysis, we identify the advantages of using these e-Learning standards from the point of view of Learning Analytics.

Spain holds a worldwide privileged position with extraordinary rates of organ deceased donation resulting from an organizational approach known as the “Spanish Model”. The Spanish National Transplant Organization (ONT) is making a continuous effort to improve its teaching methods and to share its knowledge with other countries.

This paper presents a preliminary evaluation of the perceived entertainment value and ease of use of three eyes-free interfaces for point-and-click games. Interface 1 (I1) uses a web-like cyclical navigation system to change the focused interactive element. Interface 2 (I2) uses a sonar to help the user locate interactive elements with the mouse. Interface 3 (I3) interprets natural language commands typed in by the player. Results suggest that I2 adds more entertainment value and is appropriate for experienced players. Players find I1 is the easiest to use while I3 seems more adequate for users with little gaming experience.

Development, packaging and deployment of educational games following e-Learning standards has benefits, such as improved reusability and interoperability of contents. Moreover, standards can facilitate that games exchange data with other software agents (e.g. Learning Management Systems - LMS) in a standardized manner, which opens up a wide range of possibilities for next generation Game-Based Learning experiences. However, the application of standards to games poses a technical challenge. There is a clear need for tools that simplify this process for teachers and educators with limited technical background. In this paper we present how the; platform is addressing this problem, with special focus in the exchange of data to/from the games. Tools being developed for facilitating packaging, deployment and debugging of educational games with standards are described. On the one hand, these tools facilitate testing and debugging since they allow simulation of game deployment with active communication without needing a back-end LMS. On the other hand, they smooth the learning curve that is needed to understand the standards and their possibilities when combined with games. Finally a case study focusing on the SCORM standard is presented.

Can mobile learning disrupt methods and practices in the educational sector? This is the question we want to answer in this special session. Several examples of mobile educational applications are presented that have been carried out within the eMadrid excellence network.

The evaluation process is key for educator's acceptance of any educational action. The evaluation is challenging in most cases but especially when educational games are used. In educational games if in-game evaluation exist it is usually based on a series of simple goals and whether these goals are achieved (i.e. assessment). But we consider that evaluation can be improved by taking advantage of in-game interaction, such as the user behavior during the game and the type and number of interactions performed by the user while playing. In this paper, we propose an evaluation framework for educational games based on in-game interaction data. We discuss how user interaction data is collected in the most automatic and seamless way possible, how to analyze the data to extract relevant information, and how to present this information in a usable way to educators so they achieve the maximum benefit from the experience. The evaluation framework is implemented as part of the eAdventure educational platform, where it can be used both to improve upon traditional basic assessment methods (i.e. goals, scores & reports) and to provide information to help improve interaction with games (e.g. discovery strategies).

Game·Tel is an open source software system that supports personalized learning, focusing on serious games and simulations, making these and traditional content accessible and adaptive to the student and educational context. In this paper we discuss about its design and functionalities, its modular architecture and the multi-environment approach.

The introduction of new technologies in education raises accessibility issues, which can endanger the universal right to education for students with disabilities. Moreover, in education there is a shift to provide more dynamic and interactive content to the students and video games have been proposed to promote the development of new skills. In this paper we discuss the main challenges of introducing accessibility in game educational software and how they are being addressed within the authoring tool for educational games. The goal is to turn into a holistic solution for the development of accessible educational games.

In e-Learning the interest on the use of new kinds of highly-interactive content is increasing. In this regard video games are one of the media that is gaining momentum because of their high potential for enhancing both students' motivation and learning outcomes. Nevertheless, the actual adoption of games in the educational system is scarce. In this paper we identify different open issues to be addressed to reach the aforementioned goal. To deal with these issues and broaden the use of educational video games, we propose their integration into the existing e-Learning infrastructure. Moreover, we present the integration of the educational game platform into the widespread Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) and discuss how this approach contributes to push forward the generalized adoption of educational video games.

The MTDL 2010 workshop in its second edition aims to continue in the contribution and evaluation of the impact of multimedia technologies to e-Learning. This workshop is held in conjunction with the ACM Multimedia 2010 Conference in Firenze (Italy). As a cover paper of this workshop, we briefly summarize important issues to be addressed in e-learning in the first section, followed by a discussion of important issues proposed in the 6 papers accepted to the workshop (among the 14 submissions).

Although Virtual Learning Environments have become popular educational tools, they remain a very active research topic. Two important aspects being discussed for next-generation VLEs are how to track the performance of the students for assessment and how to provide personalized learning experiences (i.e. adaptive learning). In this line, educational videogames could contribute thanks to their highly interactive nature. However the combination of VLEs and educational games requires solving diverse conceptual and practical challenges. In this paper we present a general architecture to integrate games in VLEs with special emphasis on how to abstract the communication between the videogames and the VLEs for assessment and adaptation purposes.

IMS Learning Design (IMS LD) is a powerful and expressive educational modeling language, which is becoming a “de facto” encoding and interchange standard for activity-based courses. IMS LD expressivity includes functionalities such as the adaptation of the runtime behavior of the courses according to the performance and the specific needs of the learners. But these formally described courses, called Units of Learning (UoLs) in IMS LD, are difficult to understand and reuse by instructors, hindering IMS LD adoption. In this paper we describe how these shortcomings are resolved in e-LD, a flow-oriented authoring tool for IMS LD. In e-LD preexisting designs encoded in IMS LD are automatically processed to produce a more understandable presentation with different views, such as a browse-able hyper-textual view or a graphical representation of the dependencies between UoL conditions and other components of the learning design. These views help to enhance UoLs’ comprehension by instructors.

In this paper we describe the e-LD approach for the design and repurposing of Units of Learning (UoLs). This approach is centered in domain-specific Educational Modeling Languages (EMLs) built with the close collaboration between instructors and developers. The products of this collaboration are: (i) the definition of a suitable authoring EML, and (ii) the construction of software tools to allow the importation and authoring of UoLs. The domain-specific authoring EMLs and tools simplify the production and repurposing of UoLs.

This paper presents the adaptation model used in NUCLEO, a pilot e-learning environment that is currently being developed at the Complutense University of Madrid. The NUCLEO system combines two approaches grounded in the constructive pedagogical stream, the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning and the Problem Based Learning, with the engaging and immersive formats of the videogames. It provides a futurist scenario in which students (represented by avatars and organized in small teams) have to collaborate to solve a learning ldquomissionrdquo following the mechanics of a classical role based play. In order to increase the efficiency of the collaborative work and to reduce the teacherpsilas workload, NUCLEO applies user modeling techniques to the studentspsila learning strategies, considering a simplified framework of Vermuntpsilas model for learning styles. The model determines how the system brings together students whose learning strategies are complementary to build up collaborative and semi-autonomous learning teams. Examples from an ongoing study with NUCLEO to teach programming disciplines illustrate the presentation of these adaptation models.

Digital games are becoming a rising trend in e-Learning due to their potential educational benefits. However, their application is hindered by issues such as their high production costs and the difficulty of getting instructors involved in the development process, a required aspect in order to achieve educational value. In this paper we propose to tackle those issues by developing new, instructor-oriented, authoring tools for educational videogames. These principles are carried out in the platform: a complete instructor-oriented authoring toolkit for educational point-and-click adventure videogames.

In this paper we propose a language-driven approach for the high-level design of interactive applications architected according to the model-view-controller pattern. The approach is especially well-suited for applications that incorporate contents with sophisticated structures, and whose interactive behavior is driven by these structures. In our approach we characterize the structure of the contents stored in the applications’ models with suitable domain-specific languages. Then we characterize the interactive behavior of these applications by assigning suitable operational semantics to these languages. The resulting designs are amenable to support rapid prototyping, exploration and early discovery of application features, systematic implementation using standard web-based technologies, and rational collaboration processes between domain experts and developers during production and maintenance. We exemplify the approach in the e-learning domain with a system for the production of Socratic tutors.

Abstract The platform is a new experimental e‐learning environment that adheres closely to IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. e‐learning standards in order to facilitate their applicability in different learning scenarios. is equipped with an integrated modular and extensible architecture for the authoring of IMS‐compliant learning materials focused on the IMS manifest. This manifest‐driven architecture facilitates maintenance and promotes the evolution of the authoring system in , both of which are mandatory requirements in the successful production and maintenance of content for many different specialized learning domains. In this paper, we describe this authoring system, its manifest‐driven architecture and its implementation using well‐known and robust Java‐based Web technologies. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this paper we show how descriptive markup technologies can help teachers in the production of learning content that later could be used for many different purposes with different pedagogical approaches and for many different platforms. Our approach is illustrated using a manual-writing metaphor for the production of learning contents in the Computer Science domain.

In this paper we describe our work on the formulation of a document-oriented paradigm for improving the construction and maintenance of content-intensive applications (i.e. applications that make intensive use of the information provided by the experts in a given domain: the contents). According to this paradigm, the development of a content-intensive application must be the result of close collaboration between two kinds of actors: domain experts and developers. The goal of this collaboration is the authoring of (i) a set of documents describing the most relevant aspects of the application (i.e. the contents and other relevant customizable features); (ii) a grammar describing a domain-specific markup language that will be used to make the structure and the data in these documents explicit and (iii) a suitable processor for this language. The final running application will be automatically produced by processing the marked documents with this processor. The use of this paradigm in the development of content-intensive applications can increase the initial cost of application production, but in the long run it can substantially improve maintenance and portability, and promote information and software reuse as well. We have successfully applied this paradigm to the development of educational and hypermedia applications, and knowledge-based systems. From these experiences, we have found that the feasibility of the paradigm depends to a

In this paper we promote a document-oriented approach to the development of content-intensive applications (i.e., applications that critically depend on the informational contents and on the characterization of the contents' structure). This approach is the result of our experience as developers in the educational and in the hypermedia domains, as well as in the domain of knowledge-based systems. The main reason for choosing the document-oriented approach is to make it easier for domain experts to comprehend the elements that represent the main application's features. Among these elements are: the application's contents, the application's customizable properties including those of its interface, and the structure of all this information. Therefore, in our approach, these features are represented by means of a set of application documents, which are marked up using a suitable descriptive Domain-Specific Markup Language (DSML). If this goal is fully accomplished, the application itself can be automatically produced by processing those documents with a suitable processor for the DSML defined. The document-oriented development enhances the production and maintenance of content-intensive applications, because the applications' features are described in the form of human-readable and editable documents, understandable by domain experts and suitable for automatic processing. Nevertheless, the main drawbacks of the approach are the planning overload of the whole production process and the costs of the provision and maintenance of the DSMLs and their processors. These drawbacks can be palliated by adopting an incremental strategy for the production and maintenance of the applications and also for the definition and the operationalization of the DSMLs.

Latest-generation hypermedia applications represent a new challenge in traditional design and development software engineering techniques. Although there is an impressive array of models to design hypertext applications, these models may not be specially suited for conceptualization-prototyping stages. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive software engineering approach for dealing with the conceptualization, prototyping, and process of hypermedia applications. This approach uses the Pipe Model to characterize hypermedia applications during the conceptualization stage, while prototyping is accomplished using XML and Java technologies. An XML-based representation of the Pipe structures is the input for a Java application that automatically builds the prototypes of the hypermedia application. This XML representation may reference to Subordinate Processes, i.e. compiled Java classes that implement a predefined interface and can be executed in the hypermedia application without interacting with the navigation. We also present the Plumbing and PlumbingXJ process models, two specializations of a well-known hypermedia process model, which integrate and manage the use of the Pipe model and its associated XML and Java technologies.