This article examines the process of change through the narratives that two teachers tell to describe their journey over time while participating in the Statecraft X game-based learning program. Data from post dialogic session interviews is used to elicit the challenges and areas of improvement that teachers identify. The two teachers, whose case-study is being used in this paper, had contrasting experiences to share with respect to their professional goals and motivations. One of the teachers did not experience many perturbations, while the journey for the other teacher was loaded with personal and professional struggles. Insights from teachers’ narratives indicate some patterns of change that made appropriation successful for one and much less so for the other. These include (a) moving from not adhering to lesson plan to real time ‘thinking on the feet’ (b) shifting from teacher centric to student centric classrooms, and (c) ‘letting go of control’ to facilitate more active student learning. These changes have implications for teacher professional development with respect to game-based learning and teachers’ readiness for 21st century classrooms.

Statecraft X, a fantasy multiplayer strategic game designed to assimilate principles of governance and related concepts on citizenship played on Apple i-phones, is developed based on performance pedagogy. Two secondary three classes of students were involved in this study. The study intends to examine any significant shifts in the students’ thinking and learning attitudes, beliefs, creativity and skills after playing with the i-phone game Statecraft X in their own time outside Social Studies lessons on governance. The experimental study was conducted at a secondary school in Singapore promoting the use of technology in learning. Pre- and post tests were used to check for experimental effects. Preliminary results of the study served to inform the researchers and teachers on the effects of the use of a game like Statecraft X in helping students to develop inquiry attitudes and process skills. During the intervention, teachers employed non-authoritarian, dialogical and non-indoctrinating pedagogical methods to facilitate independent thinking in students.

The objectives of this paper are to explore the characteristics of patterns of participation in social and game-play spaces outside the classroom of 10 fifteen-year-olds engaging in mobile game-based learning, and to determine whether there are gender differences in their use of social and game-play spaces. The data indicate some evidence of gender differences in their use. The boys in the study tended to engage in mobile game-based learning more than girls in game-play spaces. The girls tended to use the social space more than the boys and were especially more active in their use of the in-game chat system.

In this paper, we investigate the effect of the mobile game-based social studies curriculum Statecraft X on the quality of student work. This curriculum involved 34 secondary three students using a mobile game played on Apple iPhones— Statecraft X—to engage in governorship practices in the game world of Velar. As part of the Play-between-World curriculum, students also construct their ideal practices of governance in the fictional world of Bellalonia through in-class and outside the classroom activities. The control group of 39 students underwent the regular curriculum in the school for the same duration. Students in the intervention group had significantly higher scores for the assessment criteria of relevance, perspective, and personal voice in a writing task than those in the control group.

This paper presents a game-based learning program designed to foster classroom discourse toward doing science with language. Both schools and professional science communities practice science, but the beliefs guiding their practices and discourse patterns are significantly different. In schools, students talk about science in order to learn the ready-made science. In professional science communities, scientists use and develop language as tools for constructing scientific knowledge. In order to transform the discourse practice in the mainstream science classrooms as doing science with language, we design the Legends of Alkhimia 3D role-playing game and curriculum.

Abstract The technology of embodied conversational agents provides an attractive approach to achieving natural human—computer interaction if the interaction design is handled sensitively. In view of this, we designed and developed an embodied tour guide, Elva, ‘who’ is able to engage conversationally with users about gallery exhibits and also capable of behaving non‐verbally using gesture and facial expression. The research focuses on the attributes of agent autonomy and believability. To achieve autonomy, we present a three‐layer architectural design to ensure appropriate coupling between the agent's perception and action. With regard to believability, we utilize the notion of schema to support structured and coherent verbal behaviours. We also pay careful attention to the design of non‐verbal interactions that establish social facts within the virtual world. A user study was performed to evaluate user satisfaction and agent believability. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Despite almost 25 years of research related to "misconceptions" in science education, students today still widely hold erroneous beliefs about natural phenomena and continue to engage in intuitive forms of pseudo-scientific reasoning. In this paper, we stress the importance of grounding concept in percept when students engage learning. We appeal to Kolb's experiential learning theory to guide the design of C-VISions, a collaborative learning environment that provides experientially grounded learning. We report partial results from an empirical study of three students learning kinematics in C-VISions, presenting some quantitative as well as qualitative findings. We discuss our findings in relation to the pervasive misconception referred to in the literature as "V-F reasoning." We conclude by pointing to ongoing research to develop pedagogical agent support in C-VISions to complete the conception of experiential learning advocated here.

The technology of embodied conversational agents in virtual worlds provides an attractive way to achieve natural and realistic human-computer interaction if the interaction designs is handled sensitively. In view of this, we aim at building an embodied tour guide that is able to engage conversationally with system users about gallery exhibits, and capable of behaving according to social norms in terms of gesture and facial expression. The research has focused on the attributes of agent autonomy and believability, not truthfulness. To achieve agent autonomy, we present a three-layered architectural design to ensure appropriate coupling between agent's perception and action, and to hide the internal mechanism from users. We then work towards agent believability: we utilize the notion of schema to support structured and coherent verbal behaviors; careful attention has also been paid to the design of non-verbal agent interactions that help to establish social facts within the virtual world. Our discussion focuses on how reasoning, planning and generation of the verbal and non-verbal behaviors are performed using the schema-based framework. Finally the agent-user interactions are illustrated with a case study.

A robust technology that automates the diagnosis of students' programs is essential for programming tutoring systems. Such technology should be able to determine whether programs coded by a student are correct. If a student's program is incorrect, the system should be able to pinpoint errors in the program as well as explain and correct the errors. Due to the difficulty of this problem, no existing system performs this task entirely satisfactorily, and this problem still hampers the development of programming tutoring systems. This paper describes a transformation-based approach to automate the diagnosis of students' programs for programming tutoring systems. Improved control-flow analysis and data-flow analysis are used in program analysis. Automatic diagnosis of student programs is achieved by comparing the student program with a specimen program at the semantic level after both are standardized. The approach was implemented and tested on 525 real student programs for nine different programming tasks. Test results show that the method satisfies the requirements stated above. Compared to other existing approaches to automatic diagnosis of student programs, the approach developed here is more rigorous and safer in identifying student programming errors. It is also simpler to make use of in practice. Only specimen programs are needed for the diagnosis of student programs. The techniques of program standardization and program comparison developed here may also be useful for research in the fields of program understanding and software maintenance.

The rapid growth of the Internet, coupled with improved multimedia capabilities in computing, has expanded the options for using technology to support collaborative learning. Asynchronous electronic conferencing is commonly used to support distributed discourse-based learning. Mind Bridges is a Web-based threaded discussion forum with support for embedded multimedia content. This paper describes the Mind Bridges system as well as an empirical study of its use to support science learning. The authors monitored the pattern of usage and the trajectory of collaborative discourse manifested by participants. They found a shift in the percentage of shallow comments and learned facts towards independent thinking statements over time. However, improvement in students' conceptual understanding was hindered by their weak reasoning abilities.