Participatory Digital Gameplay Narrative Design for Public Space Sustainability Management: Empirical Research with Primary School Children

This paper reports results of completed research with primary school children which took place in Athens, Greece. Children engaged in designing the play experience of digital mini-games corresponding to episodes/missions of an entire plot. The games were coded by the school teacher on low-end mobile phones using AppInventor and were then played by children designers and testers. The game plot concerned restoring management rules for a public space (an urban park), along sustainability principles. The results focused on the participation processes of children in critical game narrative design, and decision-making about public space management alternatives to embed in game narrative design

Increased Content Accessibility For Wikis And Blogs

This paper aims to introduce a useful approach on the combined use of template based publishing tools (i.e. for blogs and wikis) and content personalization services. The approach considers that the original developers of web content have limited awareness on accessibility issues, and they are facilitated and guided by the editing interface. The publishing mechanism is responsible for storing web content in a flexible representation, where structured content is separated from the formatting information. Intermediate brokering services (i.e aggregators, mediators or simply the portal software) produce multiple versions of the same content in order to increase content accessibility. Finally, end-users are able to set their preferences on how the content will be presented and get a homogeneous representation of the community content. The different versions may comprise multiple languages, audio and text representations etc and be based on a single version of the original content. The structured nature of content produced by template based tools allows intermediate services to intervene and reproduce the original content in various formats and client tools to filter and present information according to user needs and capabilities. The paper presents the focal points of the suggested approach, details on the underlying architecture and presents the required supporting infrastructure

E-Parliaments and Novel Parliament-to-Citizen services

In an era of citizens’ discontentment on democratic institutions, parliaments as a democratic cornerstone, are constantly striving to create alluring services taking, at the same time, into account the difficulty of achieving accessibility and transparency in citizens’ e-participation. At the same time, the evolution of ICT tools presents opportunities to revamp the traditional character, functions and services of parliaments worldwide, giving rise to new capabilities and opportunities that can transform their political and social role. An e-enabled parliament can not only offer flexibility in parliamentary proceedings and facilitate the work of its members, but also strive for the inclusion of citizens, without annulling the representative character of the institution. In this paper, we present an initial overview of the characteristics of modern parliaments, recording existing service offerings and proposing a stakeholder-based categorization, with specific categories that can best accommodate explicit and active citizen participation within parliamentary functions. A number of existing citizen deliberation applications and research projects are highlighted as potential candidates for deploying novel extrovert parliament-to-citizen services, focused directly on citizen involvement. Moreover, the focus area based on the procedure from inclusion to feedback will give good evidence for all those factors that are necessary for a successful adoption of novel e-parliament services

Learning and intergenerational communication through digital storytelling in the first grades of primary school: Yesteryear Jobs

The research reported in this paper examines how two different groups, primary school children and elderly people, could close the generation gap through a digital storytelling-based interaction framework that can result in learning for the younger and intergenerational communication. Yesteryear jobs have been chosen as the theme of this research, based on the premise that, as computers and automated systems increasingly take the jobs humans once held, entire professions become extinct, and some of these endangered professions, from a milkman to an iceman, could become better known to primary school children through storytelling from elderly people. In this respect, the research reported in this paper has combined digital storytelling with techniques as traditional as theatrical games, in order to create a blended framework for intergenerational interactions. The research project was realized in the 15th Primary School of Piraeus, in Athens, Greece during academic years 2011-12 and 2012-13. It has involved a 6-month empirical study and embraced skills such as literature reading, story and song listening, painting, creating digital stories as well as improvising through theatrical games. The evaluation tools for the outcomes of this project comprised a questionnaire, participant observation, informal interviews and a video rubric for evaluating the digital creations of schoolchildren

Digital Words of Wisdom? Milia (AppleTree), An Online Platform for Digital Storytelling

This paper introduces Milia (AppleTree), an open online platform for social interactive digital storytelling, which has been developed by the Laboratory of New Technologies in Communication, Education and the Mass Media, with the support of the University Research Institute of Applied Communication (URIAC) of the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies of the University of Athens. The Milia platform aims to support the representation, presentation and collaborative creation of any sort of stories in digital format. Applications of the platform can be found in storytelling per se, in education, in publishing and, more generally, in the creation and publication of collaborative digital works. The first part of the paper is focused on a state of the art review for digital storytelling platforms and discussion of some major challenges that these platforms are attempting to face. This review is followed by a second part, which discusses the technical features and functional capabilities of the Milia platform in detail, and a third part, which reports on applications of the platform that have already been realized and digital stories that are already available online. The paper is concluded with a discussion of limitations and directions of future work for the Milia platform

The Children’s rights education via game-based activities: An intervention in kindergarten

This paper presents an effort for introducing children rights to preschool students transcending conventional methods. An educational intervention was designed and developed for the introduction of preschoolers to issues of survival, development, non-discrimination and protection rights through digital games. The latter were used in online sessions, due to Covid-19 constraints. Educational effectiveness was studied through qualitative analysis of interviews with children before and after the intervention, through questionnaires regarding their degree of fun, and through the projects and the comments they produced during online sessions. Results showed that, following the intervention, individual rights occupied a more central place in the children’s self-awareness. All children approached the issues of rights in relation to the improvement of the quality of life and demonstrated an ethical reasoning regarding the reciprocity of social rules. Digital games mobilized children's creative thinking, dialogue and social reflection through role-playing in distant instructional scenarios. They became useful tools as an asynchronous activity for the creative expression of social messages as well as for the interaction between children and parents. This study highlights the potential of promoting a critical approach to rights-based social issues through digital games at preschool education, as well as the need for developing serious games explicitly focused on children rights education. At the same time, further research is necessary to explore and cross-reference the views of students and parents on children rights for, and through, the use of digital games

Exploring the impact of freeform gameplay on players' experience: an experiment with maze games at varying levels of freedom of movement

This paper describes an experiment which aims to examine whether different versions of the same game, which differ only in terms of freedom of movement that incurs varying degrees of freeform gameplay, elicit different kinds of player experiences. Seventy one children aged 9 and 11 from a Greek primary school participated in a research experiment with these different game versions. Post-tests were used to measure the children's opinion of these games and differences in the appeal of the versions were then attributed to the feature of freeform gameplay. The findings from the study demonstrated that the digital game that offers the greatest extent of freeform gameplay led to better gaming experience than the digital games with lower extent of freeform gameplay. The main contribution of the paper, therefore, is that the research conducted provides some evidence that freeform gameplay is an important factor of positive gaming experience, and as such it should be optimized. This can only be done by considering at the same time the cognitive capabilities and pre-existing skills and knowledge of users, in the sense that only a level of freeform gameplay harmonized with user capabilities can lead users to learn, which is the ultimate goal of serious games

Exploring the impact of freeform gameplay on players’ experience: an experiment with maze games at varying levels of freedom of movement

This paper describes an experiment which aims to examine whether different versions of the same game, which differ only in terms of freedom of movement that incurs varying degrees of freeform gameplay, elicit different kinds of player experiences. Seventy one children aged 9 and 11 from a Greek primary school participated in a research experiment with these different game versions. Post-tests were used to measure the children’s opinion of these games and differences in the appeal of the versions were then attributed to the feature of freeform gameplay. The findings from the study demonstrated that the digital game that offers the greatest extent of freeform gameplay led to better gaming experience than the digital games with lower extent of freeform gameplay. The main contribution of the paper, therefore, is that the research conducted provides some evidence that freeform gameplay is an important factor of positive gaming experience, and as such it should be optimized. This can only be done by considering at the same time the cognitive capabilities and pre-existing skills and knowledge of users, in the sense that only a level of freeform gameplay harmonized with user capabilities can lead users to learn, which is the ultimate goal of serious games