Supporting learning activities in virtual worlds: methods, tools and evaluation

2011 - 2012Continuing advances and reduced costs in computational power, graphics and network bandwidth let 3D immersive multi‐user Virtual Worlds (VWs) become increasingly accessible while offering an improved and engaging quality of experience. Excited at the prospects of engaging their Net Generation, students and educators worldwide are attempting to exploit the affordances of three‐dimensional (3D) VWs. Environments such as Second Life (SL) are increasingly used in education, often for their flexibility in facilitating student‐directed, self‐paced learning and their communication features. Research on the educational value of VWs has revealed their potential as learning platforms. However, further studies are always needed in order to assess their effectiveness, satisfactorily and social engagement, not only in the general didactic use of the environment, but also for each specific learning subjects, activities and modality. A major question in using VWs in education is finding appropriate value‐added educational applications. The main challenge is to determine learning approaches in which learning in a VW presents added value with respect to traditional education, and to effectively utilize the third dimension to avoid using the environment simply as a communication platform. In addition, the educational VW activities become more and more sophisticated, starting from the early ones based only on information displaying and teaching resources to simulated laboratory and scenarios. The more complex the learning activities are, the more the challenge of guiding students during their learning trajectories increases and there is the need of providing them with appropriate support and guidance. The main contributions of this thesis are summarized as follows: (i) we propose an appropriate value‐added educational application that supports individual learning activities effectively exploiting the third dimension. In particular, we adopt a VW to support the learning of engineering practices based on technical drawing. The proposed system called VirtualHOP trains the students in the way of learning‐by‐doing methodology to build the required 3D objects; (ii) we enhance an helping system with the avatar appearance and AI for helping the exploration of environments and fruition of distance didactic activities in SL; (iii) we empirically evaluate the didactic value and the user perceptions concerning both the learning setting and the avatar‐based virtual assistant. The results demonstrate the usefulness of both the didactic experiences offered in SL and a positive attitude of the learners in terms of enjoyment and ease‐of‐use. [edited by author]XI n.s

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion

LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum

Task Allocation in Foraging Robot Swarms:The Role of Information Sharing

Autonomous task allocation is a desirable feature of robot swarms that collect and deliver items in scenarios where congestion, caused by accumulated items or robots, can temporarily interfere with swarm behaviour. In such settings, self-regulation of workforce can prevent unnecessary energy consumption. We explore two types of self-regulation: non-social, where robots become idle upon experiencing congestion, and social, where robots broadcast information about congestion to their team mates in order to socially inhibit foraging. We show that while both types of self-regulation can lead to improved energy efficiency and increase the amount of resource collected, the speed with which information about congestion flows through a swarm affects the scalability of these algorithms

Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computational Structures, FOSSACS 2022, which was held during April 4-6, 2022, in Munich, Germany, as part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2022. The 23 regular papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 77 submissions. They deal with research on theories and methods to support the analysis, integration, synthesis, transformation, and verification of programs and software systems

Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computational Structures, FOSSACS 2022, which was held during April 4-6, 2022, in Munich, Germany, as part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2022. The 23 regular papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 77 submissions. They deal with research on theories and methods to support the analysis, integration, synthesis, transformation, and verification of programs and software systems

State of New Hampshire. Annual reports, 1894. Vol. III.

Sometimes issued both annually and biennially; Each vol. contains the reports of various departments of the government of the state of New Hampshire; Includes attorneys general\u27s opinion