Simlandscape: serious gaming in participatory spatial

In an attempt to improve support for contemporary spatial planning practice, Simlandscape has been developed. In this document the development of Simlandscape as ¿serious game¿ in digital form is described. In its current state, Simlandscape exists in two methodological forms; as an analogue game and as a planning support system using GIS for research and design. The game focuses on simulation of plan processes and on the resulting transformation of areas involved. Players interact with an analogue area model. The planning support system focuses on design and evaluation of plan scenarios and the data handling and presentation accompanying this process. A major challenge now is to integrate, upgrade and digitize components of the analogous game with the planning support system. Several interesting components (practical and scientific) of this project are identified and are discussed

Toward emotional interactive videogames for children with autism spectrum disorder

Technology and videogames have been proven as motivating tools for working attention and complex communication skills, especially in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this work, we present two experiences that used interactive games for promoting communication and attention. The first game considers emotions in order to measure children’s attention, concentration and satisfaction, while the second uses tangible tabletops for fostering cognitive planning. The analysis of the results obtained allows to propose a new study integrating both, in which the tangible interactive game is complemented with the emotional trainer in a way that allows identifying and classifying children’s emotion with ASD when they collaborate to solve cognitively significant and contextualized challenges. The first application proposed is an emotional trainer application in which the child can work out the seven basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise and neutral). Further, a serious videogame is proposed: a 3D maze where the emotions can be captured. The second case study was carried out in a Special Education Center, where a set of activities for working cognitive planning was proposed. In this case, a tangible interactive tabletop was used to analyze, in students with ASD, how the communication processes with these interfaces affect to the attention, memory, successive and simultaneous processing that compose cognitive planning from the PASS model. The results of the first study, suggest that the autistic children did not act with previous planning, but they used their perception to adjust their actions a posteriori (that explains the higher number of collisions). On the second case study, the successive processing was not explored. The inclusion of the mazes of case study 1 to a semantic rich scenario could allow us to measure the prior planning and the emotions involved in the maze game. The new physiological sensors will also help to validate the emotions felt by the children. The first study has as objective the capability to imitate emotions and resolve a maze without semantic context. The second study organized all the actions from a semantic context close to users. The attention results presented by the second study are coherent with the first study and complement it showing that attention can be receptive or selective. In the first study case, the receptive attention was the focus of analysis. In the second case, both contributed to explain and understand how it can be developed from a videogame

The design-by-adaptation approach to universal access: learning from videogame technology

This paper proposes an alternative approach to the design of universally accessible interfaces to that provided by formal design frameworks applied ab initio to the development of new software. This approach, design-byadaptation, involves the transfer of interface technology and/or design principles from one application domain to another, in situations where the recipient domain is similar to the host domain in terms of modelled systems, tasks and users. Using the example of interaction in 3D virtual environments, the paper explores how principles underlying the design of videogame interfaces may be applied to a broad family of visualization and analysis software which handles geographical data (virtual geographic environments, or VGEs). One of the motivations behind the current study is that VGE technology lags some way behind videogame technology in the modelling of 3D environments, and has a less-developed track record in providing the variety of interaction methods needed to undertake varied tasks in 3D virtual worlds by users with varied levels of experience. The current analysis extracted a set of interaction principles from videogames which were used to devise a set of 3D task interfaces that have been implemented in a prototype VGE for formal evaluation

Simlandscape: serious gaming in participatory spatial planning

In an attempt to improve support for contemporary spatial planning practice, Simlandscape has been developed. In this document the development of Simlandscape as serious game in digital form is described. In its current state, Simlandscape exists in two methodological forms; as an analogue game and as a planning support system using GIS for research and design. The game focuses on simulation of plan processes and on the resulting transformation of areas involved. Players interact with an analogue area model. The planning support system focuses on design and evaluation of plan scenarios and the data handling and presentation accompanying this process. A major challenge now is to integrate, upgrade and digitize components of the analogous game with the planning support system. Several interesting components (practical and scientific) of this project are identified and are discussed

An educational game to teach children about air quality using augmented reality and tangible interaction with sensors

Air pollution is known to be one of the main causes of injuries to the respiratory system and even premature death. Gases, particles, and biological compounds affect not only the air we breathe outdoors, but also indoors. Children are highly affected by the poor quality of the air they breathe because their organs and immune systems are still in the developmental stages. To contribute to raising children’s awareness to these concerns, this article presents the design, implementation, and experimental validation of an serious augmented reality game for children to playfully learn about air quality by interacting with physical sensor nodes. The game presents visual representations of the pollutants measured by the sensor node, rendering tangible the invisible. Causal knowledge is elicited by stimulating the children to expose real-life objects (e.g., candles) to the sensor node. The playful experience is amplified by letting children play in pairs. The game was evaluated using the Wizard of Oz method in a sample of 27 children aged between 7 and 11 years. The results show that the proposed game, in addition to improving children’s knowledge about indoor air pollution, is also perceived by them as easy to use and a useful learning tool that they would like to continue using, even in other educational contexts.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An application to improve emotional skills in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Dissertação de Mestrado Integrado em Engenharia de Eletrónica Industrial e ComputadoresThis dissertation presents a project developed with the aim of promoting emotional skills in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The project involves a serious game and a playware object, which is a physical component that acts as the game controller and allows the user to interactively play the serious game. The playware object has six pressure buttons, each one showing an emoji with a specific facial expression and communicates wirelessly via Bluetooth with the serious game app installed in an Android device. The facial expressions used are: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and neutral/normal. They were applied to the three game activities (imitation, recognition and storytelling). The chain of tests started with an online questionnaire to validate the avatars created to represent the previously mentioned facial expressions in the game (with 114 answers and a mean success rate of 96.2%), which was followed by a usability test of the application (serious game and playware object) with six typically developing children (with 94.4% answer accuracy). Finally, the three game activities were tested with six children with ASD in three/four sessions. Due to the small group test and the short number of sessions, the goal was to test the acceptance of the game rather than the users´ improvement in the activity. It is worth referring that both the serious game and the playware object had a high level of approval from the children and they expressed their interest during the activities. With this project it was intended to contribute to the development of pedagogical resources to be used by professionals and families in the support of children with ASD.Esta dissertação apresenta um projeto desenvolvido com o objetivo de promover capacidades emocionais em crianças com Perturbação do Espectro do Autismo. Este projeto envolve um jogo sério e um objeto playware, que é um componente físico que funciona como controlador de jogo e permite que o utilizador jogue o jogo sério de uma forma interativa. O objeto playware tem seis botões de pressão, cada um com um emoji com uma expressão facial específica, e comunica sem fios por Bluetooth com a aplicação do jogo sério instalada no dispositivo Android. As expressões faciais usadas são: felicidade, tristeza, medo, raiva, surpresa e neutro/normal. Estas foram aplicadas às três diferentes atividades de jogo (imitar, reconhecer e contar histórias). A cadeia de testes começou com um questionário online para validar os avatares criados para representar as expressões faciais previamente mencionadas no jogo (com 114 submissões e uma taxa média de sucesso de 96,2%), seguido de um teste de usabilidade da aplicação (jogo sério e objeto playware) com seis crianças tipicamente desenvolvidas (com 94,4% de respostas corretas). Por fim, as três atividades de jogo foram testadas com seis crianças com Perturbação do Espectro do Autismo durante 3 a 4 sessões. Devido à pequena dimensão do grupo de teste e ao baixo número de sessões, o objetivo foi testar a aceitação do jogo em vez da evolução das capacidades dos utilizadores na atividade. É importante referir que tanto o jogo sério como o objeto playware tiveram um alto nível de aprovação por parte das crianças que expressaram o seu interesse durante as atividades. Este projeto pretende contribuir para o desenvolvimento de recursos pedagógicos a serem usados por profissionais e famílias no apoio a crianças com Perturbação do Espectro do Autismo

Hand gesture-based interactive puppetry system to assist storytelling for children

© 2016 The Author(s)Digital techniques have been used to assist narrative and storytelling, especially in many pedagogical practices. With the rapid development of HCI techniques, saturated with digital media in their daily lives, young children, demands more interactive learning methods and meaningful immersive learning experiences. In this paper, we propose a novel hand gesture-based puppetry storytelling system which provides a more intuitive and natural human computer interaction method for young children to develop narrative ability in virtual story world. Depth motion sensing and hand gestures control technology is utilized in the implementation of user-friendly interaction. Young players could intuitively use hand gestures to manipulate virtual puppet to perform story and interact with different items in virtual environment to assist narration. Based on the result of the evaluation, this novel digital storytelling system shows positive pedagogical functions on children’s narrating ability as well as the competencies of cognitive and motor coordination. The usability of the system is preliminary examined in our test, and the results which showed that young children can benefit from playing with Puppet Narrator

Augmented Reality Meets Tangibility: A New Approach for Early Childhood Education

Augmented Reality (AR) has been recognised as one of the promising technologies for the gaming industry. In this study, the authors intend to apply AR technology to develop an interactive educational game. This paper presents an AR featured educational game specifically designed for 4-7 years old pre-school children. The principal objective of this game is to enable children to learn various abstract concepts, such as colour mixing, mathematics and 2D-3D geometrical shape recognition. This game allows users to interact with both onscreen (intangible) and physical objects (tangible) at the same time; different interaction forms including the touch screen (click) and AR game (rotate) are designed for better interaction with the real world and learning. This paper focuses on the details of the design and interactive behaviour. Furthermore, beyond the needs of children, this game also serves for parents through the Token Economy method; parents can control the kids’ contacting time with portable devices, and track and modify their everyday learning patterns. A pilot study implementing mix method was used to gather user’s feedback is also described in this paper