Coding camps bring together individuals from diverse backgrounds to tackle given challenges within a limited timeframe. Such camps create a rich learning environment for various skills, some of which are directly associated with the camp, and some of which are a result of working as a team during the camp. Unfortunately, coding camps often remain isolated from the broader educational curriculum or other bigger context, which downplays the opportunities they can offer to students. In this paper, we present the vision of the European initiative OSCAR, which aims at connecting coding camps to the educational and professional context faced by the learners. In addition, we sketch a supporting platform and its features for connected coding camps.

The cybersecurity domain faces a critical disparity between the escalating demand for skilled professionals and the limited talent pool. This gap is primarily driven by the surge in cyberattacks perpetrated by malicious actors seeking financial gain or disruption. These attacks, encompassing tactics like Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) and ransomware, pose significant threats to data security and public safety. To bridge this gap, several challenges must be addressed. We need to prioritize initiatives that enhance people’s awareness and education in cybersecurity. Additionally, exploring innovative training methods and leveraging technology to equip cybersecurity professionals with the necessary skillsets is crucial.

The use of video games as an educational tool is gaining in popularity. The concept of serious games, which combine playful elements to foster learning, has been widely proven to be addictive. The ability of serious games to improve problem-solving, promote the acquisition of knowledge and skills, and foster involvement and motivation are key elements that make them effective educational tools in various fields. The contribution presents the prototype Dorobot, a serious game developed with a dual purpose: to improve students’ programming and problem-solving skills and in the meanwhile to promote awareness of environmental sustainability. The game is addressed to students in early grades of secondary schools and the pilot study yielded encouraging results regarding user appreciation and effectiveness in learning acquisition.

Childhood overweight and obesity represent an alarming problem worldwide with strong consequences both at health and social levels. Learning based on storytelling is an effective approach to enhancing children's knowledge and correct behaviors, especially when it is conveyed by engaging novel technologies. Among these technologies, social robots have a special appeal for educational purposes. The paper presents a pilot project in which the social robot Pepper is used as an educational storyteller in the context of nutrition. To investigate the appropriateness of the approach, a preliminary study was performed to compare the effects of Pepper vs a human storyteller. Results are interesting in terms of engagement, user experience, trust, and learning of relevant concepts, suggesting that the proposed approach can be effective in this domain.

People with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have difficulties in social communication and interaction. Their caregivers help them in overcoming these challenges. Social stories are tools largely adopted to improve the interaction and communication capabilities of people with ASD. The creation of a social story is not an easy task. Several guidelines have been defined to build them. In this paper, we propose an interactive mobile application aimed at empowering caregivers of people with ASD in generating social stories. The application integrates AI processing and AI-based audio transcription for story generation, effective audio data extraction, and data processing. The stories are presented in a slide-show format to the learner in different modalities according to the learner's capabilities. A preliminary usability study of the application has been performed and the first results are encouraging.

In a project partially supported by research grant PANN20_00690 to Italy's CINI National Lab "Informatica e Scuola", we compared the effectiveness of two alternative instructional methods applied to scaffold the learning of iterations for children at grades 2-3. Eight university groups across the Country collaboratively run the project in two successive rounds throughout the year 2022. Teachers' feedback collected across the two rounds helped fine-tune the deployment of the interventions. The experiment results show that the two alternative interventions have measurable outcome differences in the short term.

This paper proposes a multimodal conversational interface that supports caregivers of people with ASD in the semiautomatic creation of social stories. With the support of the multimodal interface the editor lets caregivers select the appropriate elements and the content representations to be included in the social stories by following specific guidelines. We describe the interface design and a preliminary evaluation of the mobile application. Seven caregivers of people with ASD have participated in the evaluation. Usability results are encouraging.

Computational Thinking (CT) education is spreading all over the world involving all levels of schools. Software and hardware solutions have been designed and developed to introduce CT at school. In this paper, the first trial of coding activities has been realized using Pepper Social Robot. The idea is to allow pupils to program Pepper; the mission is to guide the robot through a path on a grid sketched on the floor to reach a predefined target. A user test was conducted to evaluate the experience of pupils, in terms of effectiveness, engagement, and cognitive workload in a learning coding activity that involves the social robot Pepper. Pupils appreciated the use of the robot which can interact with them, they were very engaged in the activity and improve their knowledge about coding.

Due to its geographical position, the Apulia region, is used to house migrants from all over the world who arrived over the centuries. Apulia is also a transit land for migrants that want to reach other Italian regions or European countries. One of the main issues of migration flows is related to the health services network. In this context, the Apulia Region, in collaboration with other private and public organisations, proposed the Prevenzione 4.0 (Prevention) project that aims at creating an e-health environment to empower the services of the National Health Service for migrants. Technological solutions and learning paths will be implemented to reduce the number of users who daily ask for health care services. The actions will be available for both migrants and professional figures involved in the management of migrants' reception processes. This paper presents a mobile application designed to help the migrant centres to provide medical and psychological support to their guests. The app fosters the migrants' empowerment to make them able to take care of their health without involving the National Health Service when not strictly necessary.

In this paper we investigate the use of a social robot as an interface to a serious game aiming to train kids in how to recycle materials correctly. Serious games are mostly used to induce motivations and engagement in users and support knowledge transfer during playing. They are especially effective when the goal of the game concerns behavior change. In addition, social robots have been used effectively in educational settings to engage children in the learning process. Following this trend, we designed a serious game in which the social robot Pepper plays with a child to teach him to correctly recycle the materials. To endow the robot with the capability of detecting and classifying the waste material we developed an image recognition module based on a Convolutional Neural Network. Preliminary experimental results show that the implementation of a serious game about recycling into the Pepper robot improves its social behavior. The use of real objects as waste items during the game turns out to be a successful approach not only for perceived learning effectiveness but also for engagement of the children.

Revision control is a vital component in the collaborative development of artifacts such as software code and multimedia. While revision control has been widely deployed for text files, very few attempts to control the versioning of binary files can be found in the literature. This can be inconvenient for graphics applications that use a significant amount of binary data, such as images, videos, meshes, and animations. Existing strategies such as storing whole files for individual revisions or simple binary deltas, respectively consume significant storage and obscure semantic information. To overcome these limitations, in this paper we present a revision control system for digital images that stores revisions in form of graphs. Besides, being integrated with Git, our revision control system also facilitates artistic creation processes in common image editing and digital painting workflows. A preliminary user study demonstrates the usability of the proposed system.

The success and effectiveness of the use of technology to support education and training are universally recognized. In the recent years, the use of ICT is spreading as tools to support therapeutic education. The concept of empowerment can have different meanings: strengthening, enhancement of self, increasing of power, increased personal responsibility, increasing of knowledge, etc. This is especially true when patients are very young, as in the case of type I diabetes mellitus. When the hospitalization starts, because of both the patients' particular emotional fragility and the complexity of the blood glucose control, it is necessary to use the right form of communication that should be engaging and effective. In this context, the storytelling could be very useful since very appreciate by the children. With these premises the paper presents the idea of a Digital Storytelling CMS that allows users to build online personal narrative in digital format. A first pilot study has outlined the appreciation of the users.

The increasing exploitation of the planet's resources has important consequences on the environment. The ecological disasters, that always more often occur, remind to human how important is to foster ecological skills since childhood. In Educational Technology field, there are several of experimental evidences that prove the effectiveness of multimedia technologies in learning processes. In this context, the research herein presented describes two solutions implemented to provide children with the knowledge and skills necessary to promote and enhance environmental awareness. The learning path is composed of an Explainer Video, which illustrates the effects that marine litter can cause to health of both marine species and humans, and a Serious Game, in which the player has to help the characters to avoid junk in the sea. The serious game set is the Mediterranean Sea and the characters are four species estimated to be at risk of extinction. The pilot study conducted in order to evaluate the usability of the Serious Game pointed out the appreciation of both students and teachers.

In the last decades AHLSs have increasingly focused on human factors to develop didactic methods able to personalize learning contents to students' needs and prior knowledge. In agreement with this perspective, the present research aimed at assessing the relationship between cognitive styles and learning process in a SCORM setting. 119 undergraduate students were divided into two groups, e-learners and traditional learners. All participants completed both the Cognitive Style Questionnaire and the Intrinsic Motivation Scale in order to evenly distribute the sample. The e-learners received then the teaching materials adapted to their preferred cognitive style, whereas the traditional learners received the same but non-adapted materials. The research findings indicated the key role of the adaptation of learning contents to cognitive style in a e-learning setting even though participants' intrinsic motivation resulted low.

A challenge in the recommender systems currently available for the tourism domain is how to suggest tourist itineraries in a specific geographical area (city or region). The proposed theoretical model allows items of intangible cultural heritage (events) such as processions, festivals, special markets, etc. to be characterized and correlated. The model features both a set of functions characterizing the events and a space-time relation that defines whether two events are correlated. The model allows itineraries to be constructed by computing the transitive closure of the space-time relation on the set of events. It can be used to construct itineraries at different grain sizes. This capacity makes the model scalable and easily applicable in the development of several applications. It has been implemented in a first order logic knowledge base in order to make an empirical evaluation of the model.

Informatics has permeated the educational environments at all levels. In Italian primary schools Informatics teachers present the computer and how it works rather than the programming languages. At present, there is a deep debate about the use of programming languages and, in particular, logic programming in the primary school. On the basis of these premises, the paper presents a didactic software, named KidsPro, addressed to pupils attending fifth-grade of primary school. It aims at improving the user problem solving abilities using Prolog. In order to build an effective and efficient software the User-Centred Design approach was used and the paper presents the results of the formative evaluation performed. The results of this pilot study will be used in the further implementation of the software.

This paper presents the development of a presentation team that shows, explains and provides useful advices to children in the domain of "healthy nutrition". Agents of the team are endowed with different roles and personality traits so as to explain domain concepts from different viewpoints. In order to develop a system independent from the domain and the bodies of the agents, explanations and pieces of advice are generated and not statically scripted. The presentation plan is distributed to the various team actors and it is adapted to the characteristics of the interlocutor. To test the system and to evaluate the efficacy of the team in this domain we used a family of characters already present in the cartoon world: the Smurfies.

The ever more widespread use of the Web for knowledge sharing has led to the creation of a wide spectrum of opportunities for employing shared information resources and, at the same time, a gradual increase in the technologies for making these resources available. In this scenario, it is important to define new methods and techniques that can support users' search activities and selection of the resources corresponding most closely to their needs. The work is situated in the context of research into recommendation methods for defining systems that can suggest to users what hypermedial resource best fits their specific requirements. The paper proposes a recommendation technique that can elicit relations existing within complex domains so as to be able to suggest semantically correlated hypermedial objects to users according to their requests.

Students' and teachers' expectations about teaching and learning have undergone a complete change lately thanks to the increasing use of information technologies. New tools are now emerging, named learning object repositories, that aim to make learning resources readily accessible to educators and learners. A learning object repository (LOR) is an electronic/digital catalog that contains digital learning content and simplifies the search for LOs by using common semantic metadata. The main problem in LOR design is to define an effective method for cataloging LO users, in order to make tailored searches conforming to users' learning or teaching needs. This paper aims to discuss this issue and propose a taxonomy for cataloguing LOs using the educational section of IEEE LOM. Finally, we have applied our taxonomy to classify LOs in the automotive field.

The new challenge for designers and HCI researchers is to develop software tools for effective e-learning. Learner-Centered Design (LCD) provides guidelines to make new learning domains accessible in an educationally productive manner. A number of new issues have been raised because of the new "vehicle" for education. Effective e-learning systems should include sophisticated and advanced functions, yet their interface should hide their complexity, providing an easy and flexible interaction suited to catch students' interest. In particular, personalization and integration of learning paths and communication media should be provided.It is first necessary to dwell upon the difference between attributes for platforms (containers) and for educational modules provided by a platform (contents). In both cases, it is hard to go deeply into pedagogical issues of the provided knowledge content. This work is a first step towards identifying specific usability attributes for e-learning systems, capturing the peculiar features of this kind of applications. We report about a preliminary users study involving a group of e-students, observed during their interaction with an e-learning system in a real situation. We then propose to adapt to the e-learning domain the so called SUE (Systematic Usability Evaluation) inspection, providing evaluation patterns able to drive inspectors' activities in the evaluation of an e-learning tool.

The use of technology to support collaborative tasks and learning is at present one of the central themes of research into computer education. Recent experiences have demonstrated that computer-mediated peer interaction is in some contexts more effective than face-to-face communication. The present work aims to make a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the peer-to-peer communication fostered by the use of a Web-based environment to support cooperative learning of geometry. In line with other experiences conducted internationally, our results confirm that the use of technological support to stimulate communication has positive effects not only on the quality of the interaction but also on the quality of the learning gain of the individual members making up the cooperative community.

Today, there is growing interest in the use of Internet and WWW to achieve cooperative type activities and in particular, cooperative learning, based on the principles of constructivism. Cooperation can undoubtedly enhance network-mediated instructional systems but efficacious cooperative learning can be ensured providing these systems with components that reproduce well-established pedagogical models of cooperative learning, together with components that can assess both individual and group progress. This is made possible by introducing AI techniques in computer-aided learning systems that allow pedagogical strategies to be embedded. In this work, the authors present a system on the WWW for cooperative learning about geometric figures, where each student communicates with the rest of the group online, and a study to evaluate the cooperative learning effectiveness of our project called Geometriamo. The system is based on Slavin's Student Team Learning model for cooperative learning.