Gaming to master the game - Game usability and game mechanics

Health intervention aimed at children using serious games are starting to grow on popularity, however, Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) paradigm for serious games is in its infancy. In this article, we present a series of IDS educational games developed with the aim of promoting responsible antibiotic use and hygiene part of the edugames4all project. Despite commercial success and market popularity of IDS games one of the major challenges we encountered when the games were distributed to schools for evaluation was that many children never played a similar game before and found the concept challenging. As a result, some of the children enjoyed the game while others were frustrated and gave up at a certain point. Although the phenomenon is not new, and it present even in commercial games, we proposed a new approach to ensure that all children understand the message delivered and at the same time, they enjoy playing the game. This paper proposes the introduction of a training mission that teaches children in a game like environment the basic concepts necessary to progress through the game. The training mission was evaluated in experimental settings with two groups of children, one playing the training mission before playing the game and another one who did not. The results showed that there is no statistically significant difference in terms of usability between the two groups, however the group that did not play the training mission found the game more “awkward” to play, and the difference between the groups in this case was statistically significant

Thrački konjanik

Today, mobile devices have become an integral part of their possessor’s life. Learning using mobile devices has the advantage of receiving educational content at the moment when it is actually needed, or when the learner feels like s/he is able to study. Moreover, mobile devices used in education can augment the learning experience by delivering further information to the learner, depending on the learner’s context. However, there are still challenges to overcome in order to achieve a widespread adoption of mobile learning. One of these is the high cost of delivering educational content over wireless networks, especially when multimedia content is transmitted. This research proposes a solution that predicts the learner’s economic behaviour and takes it into account when delivering educational multimedia content. A mechanism for reducing the cost of the educational content delivery over wireless networks is also presented

On better understanding the usage of mobile phones for learning purposes

Mobile devices are omnipresent in one’s life leaping developed and developing worlds and leading to interest among researchers on how to use them for learning purposes. This article presents the results of a survey that aims to better understand the use of mobile phones for educational purposes. The results show that 54% of the participants use the mobile Internet from their phone the most cited reason being the cost. A total of 30% use their mobile phone for learning purposes and 69% have mobile devices that would allow them to watch video content. The results of people’s preferences for specific types of educational media are also presented

The effect of interactive digital storytelling gamification on microbiology classroom interactions

In this research, we study the use of interactive digital storytelling in teaching microbiology. More specifically, we carried out an exploratory study assessing the effect of using the gamification of an interactive digital storytelling on classroom dynamics and students’ interaction. The results show that the presence of gamification led to an increase in classroom discussions and in students’ engagement with the learning objectives taught by the interactive digital storytelling

Facilitating the Adoption of Public Services Using High Definition Video: The Case of Primary Education

The adoption of innovative Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in public services in general, and in education in particular has intensified in the last few years. Although electronic services in learning has been used in primary, secondary and higher education for some years, the use of live video technology to facilitate public services has rarely been explored before. In this paper, we focus on the adoption of high definition video-to-video (V2V) communication in the context of public sector primary education. This paper examines how V2V technology can be utilised in encouraging collaborative learning initiatives among different schools. Results of a preliminary case study are presented highlighting some of the technical and users criteria required to ensure a successful adoption of video-to-video communication in the context of education

Ethical Issues in AI-Enabled Disease Surveillance: Perspectives from Global Health

Infectious diseases, as COVID-19 is proving, pose a global health threat in an interconnected world. In the last 20 years, resistant infectious diseases such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), H1N1 influenza (swine flu), Ebola virus, Zika virus, and now COVID-19 have been impacting global health defences, and aggressively flourishing with the rise of global travel, urbanization, climate change, and ecological degradation. In parallel, this extraordinary episode in global human health highlights the potential for artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled disease surveillance to collect and analyse vast amounts of unstructured and real-time data to inform epidemiological and public health emergency responses. The uses of AI in these dynamic environments are increasingly complex, challenging the potential for human autonomous decisions. In this context, our study of qualitative perspectives will consider a responsible AI framework to explore its potential application to disease surveillance in a global health context. Thus far, there is a gap in the literature in considering these multiple and interconnected levels of disease surveillance and emergency health management through the lens of a responsible AI framework

Learning about Hygiene and Antibiotic Resistance through Mobile Games:Evaluation of Learning Effectiveness

Edugames4all MicrobeQuest! is a mobile game that aims to teach microbiology and create awareness about important healthcare issues among 9 to 12 years old. This article presents the game, discusses the game design and integration of the learning objectives into the game mechanics. An exploratory study has been performed to assess the game effectiveness in teaching the learning objectives integrated into the game. The study showed that the game can teach the learning objectives, however, the knowledge difference has not been statistically significant across all three learning objectives

Edu-Interact:An Authoring Tool for Interactive Digital Storytelling based Games

In this research, we present an authoring environment, Edu-Interact, that supports the creation of adaptive interactive digital storytelling based games. Edu-Interact allows to design a story that seamlessly evaluates the student knowledge, performs the subsequent adaptation of the digital storytelling, and provides a summative assessment. The authoring environment allows also to assign weights to different concepts the student could accumulate through the interaction with the storytelling. This can provide a score that could be used as a means of gamifying the interactive digital storytelling or provide teachers or other stakeholders with feedback on the student performance