Design, Development and Evaluation of a Virtual Environment with children for Moral, Social & Emotional Leaning

Virtual environments have the potential to be an important teaching tool for emotionally-sensitive issues capable of producing a sense of presence, perspective-taking and introspection in users in a risk-free, rapid feedback experience. In designing such experiences, it is essential that users are regularly engaged in a collaborative design process. However, engaging in design, development and evaluation can in itself provide a learning experience. Here, we present our approach to engaging children in the design, development and evaluation of a virtual learning environment, specifically a Serious Game, focused on inculcating empathy, ethical reasoning and reflection for coping with bullying. We demonstrate that children’s involvement not only contributed to an improved virtual environment, but significantly, engaging in the design process provided children with a novel and effective learning opportunity. Through using innovative child-centered participatory design practices, this research provides perceptive insights into how engaging children in design can be employed as a learning experience for emotionally-sensitive learning as well as an approach to gathering user design input. The material outlined in this article is directly linked to virtual worlds for positive change— meeting the needs of children, empowering them to be consulted and take responsibility for issues that affect them at school

Designing interactive virtual environments with feedback in health applications.

One of the most important factors to influence user experience in human-computer interaction is the user emotional reaction. Interactive environments including serious games that are responsive to user emotions improve their effectiveness and user satisfactions. Testing and training for user emotional competence is meaningful in healthcare field, which has motivated us to analyze immersive affective games using emotional feedbacks. In this dissertation, a systematic model of designing interactive environment is presented, which consists of three essential modules: affect modeling, affect recognition, and affect control. In order to collect data for analysis and construct these modules, a series of experiments were conducted using virtual reality (VR) to evoke user emotional reactions and monitoring the reactions by physiological data. The analysis results lead to the novel approach of a framework to design affective gaming in virtual reality, including the descriptions on the aspects of interaction mechanism, graph-based structure, and user modeling. Oculus Rift was used in the experiments to provide immersive virtual reality with affective scenarios, and a sample application was implemented as cross-platform VR physical training serious game for elderly people to demonstrate the essential parts of the framework. The measurements of playability and effectiveness are discussed. The introduced framework should be used as a guiding principle for designing affective VR serious games. Possible healthcare applications include emotion competence training, educational softwares, as well as therapy methods

An artificial neural network-based finite state machine for adaptive scenario selection in serious game

Serious game is one of the pedagogical media capable of transferring knowledge to its players. This game genre requires a support system that adaptively selects the appropriate scenario for players to increase their interest and comfort. Therefore, this study proposed an adaptive scenario selection (ASS) system using a finite state machine based on an artificial neural network (ANN). The game scenario is selected by ASS based on five player preferences, including work, hobbies/interests, origin, group members, and repetition. Furthermore, the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) architecture was used in the scenario selection process for the proposed ANN method. The experimental stage was carried out using the theme of travel in several tourism destinations in Batu City, East Java, Indonesia. The experimental results show that ASS succeeded in generating adaptive game scenario choices for players based on their preference data with an accuracy of 67.25%

Fatigue-Aware gaming system for motor rehabilitation using biocybernetic loops.

Esta tesis tiene como objetivo proponer una terapia de rehabilitación complementaria basada en paradigmas de interacción humano-computadora (HCI) que exploran i) Técnicas de rehabilitación virtual, integrando tecnologías de realidad virtual (VR) sofisticadas y (hoy en día) accesibles, ii) sensores fisiológicos de bajo costo, a saber, electromiografía de superficie (sEMG) y iii)sistema inteligente, a través de adaptación biocibernética, para proporcionar una nueva técnica de rehabilitación virtual..

Theoretical Perspectives of Hands-On Educational Practices — From a Review of Psychological Theories to Block Magic and INF@NZIA DIGI.Tales 3.6 Projects

In this chapter, the main theories related to cognitive development are discussed, starting from psychological discussion up to theories application to training, pedagogical and formation sciences issues

A Method to Visualize Patient Flow Using Virtual Reality and Serious Gaming Techniques

This paper proposes a method to visualize Emergency Department patient flow data in a Virtual Reality (VR) Serious Game (SG) environment. Visualizing the patient flow data will allow patterns and trends that hospitals can use to reduce alternative level of care (ALC) days and increase the acute capacity of the hospital. The method proposes to use Unity to develop two VR visualisations of patient flow to a hospital ED such that hospital staff can determine which of the two visualizations will be the most usable, immersive, and playable. This paper also presents future work that will look at the whole system of a hospital using one years’ worth of patient flow data to develop a usable, immersive and playable Virtual Environment (VE)

An Instructional Designer Competency Framework for Complex Learning Designs

Learning design competency frameworks published by professional organizations, exist for typical instructional design efforts. However, a review of literature revealed a lack of frameworks available for the creation of complex learning designs (CLDs). The goal of this research was to develop a competency framework for the creation of CLDs. Quantitative and qualitative methods were employed in the four phases of the design and development research approach In phase one, a survey based on the Educational Technology Multimedia Competency Survey (ETMCS) was sent to instructional designers who self-reported as having experience creating CLDs. The purpose of phase one was to identify competencies that instructional designers felt were most important to the creation of complex, technology-mediated learning designs. The preliminary CLD framework was constructed during phase two, based on analysis of the ETMCS survey results. Measures of central tendency were used to identify competencies considered essential and desirable. Additionally, competencies were categorized into seven domains In phase three, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a subset of survey participants. The purpose was to gain deeper insight into the participant’s perception of the design complexities involved with each of the competencies included in the preliminary framework. In phase four, the preliminary framework was internally validated using an expert panel employing the Delphi method to build consensus. Three rounds were required to achieve consensus on all competencies within the framework. This consensus resulted in 79 competencies including 30 essential and 49 desirable competencies from the set identified as the preliminary framework during phase two. Several conclusions emerged from the creation of this framework. Though technology is often a trigger for many types of CLDs, specific technologies are certainly desirable, but not essential. The research also revealed that communication and collaboration competencies are almost universally essential due to the complexity of the designs which typically necessitates the formation of multi-discipline teams. Without these competencies, the team’s cross-profession effectiveness is often hindered due to differences in terminology, processes, and team member geographic location

Wearables at work:preferences from an employee’s perspective

This exploratory study aims to obtain a first impression of the wishes and needs of employees on the use of wearables at work for health promotion. 76 employ-ees with a mean age of 40 years old (SD ±11.7) filled in a survey after trying out a wearable. Most employees see the potential of using wearable devices for workplace health promotion. However, according to employees, some negative aspects should be overcome before wearables can effectively contribute to health promotion. The most mentioned negative aspects were poor visualization and un-pleasantness of wearing. Specifically for the workplace, employees were con-cerned about the privacy of data collection

Time Travel Gamification of Learning and Training: From Theoretical Concepts to Practical Applications

Gamification is considered the systematic anticipation and design of affective experiences. It is not erroneously reduced to the usage of game-typical elements in another context. The human experiences in focus are varying forms of virtual time travel. In a time travel exploratory game, players return virtually to the past for gaining insights and, possibly, finding artifacts bring back to the present time. This works well for environmental education studying, by way of illustration, the worldwide ocean warming over several decades. Time travel prevention games go even further. Players who visit the past get an opportunity to impact their fate. This works well in application areas such as crime prevention and industrial accident prevention. Dynamic time travel prevention games are a recently developed game type in which the past changes dynamically to support the player’s chances of successfully completing the mission. The authors present original concepts and technologies and demonstrate running applications