Enhancing Nutritional Learning Outcomes within a Simulation and Pervasive Game-Based Strategy

The chapter outlines the design of a game to raise nutritional awareness within primary school-aged children. The game uses a blend of simulated and pervasive elements using ubiquitous technologies to enhance children’s capacity to make informed choices with regard to their own eating habits. Nute’s Adventures in Nomland is a project currently being undertaken at an Australian university to explore the potential of a casual game can be used to help parents and children understand the different nutritional values of the food they eat. The game contains both pervasive and simulation elements. The pervasive nature of the game is evident in the use of mobile phones to scan nutrition labels as part of a shopping activity. This shopping is then brought into a simulation game that allows learners to explore the effects of their decisions on a virtual pet, Nute, and then identify strategies to address shortfalls in that decision-making

A Study in Developing a Mobile Learning System based on Human-Computer Interaction Design Principles

[[abstract]]Today, the learning model of a single instructor interacting with many students that is applied in conventional classrooms forms a passive bottleneck. Moreover, the instructor cannot effectively record students’ individual learning histories for instantaneous and suitable feedback. To address these issues using a mobile learning system (MLS) the authors have applied the principles of human-computer interaction (HCI) to construct a usable MLS on a personal digital assistant (PDA) The research focuses on adaptive content delivery within the context of small-screen design. The authors utilized task analysis, a literature review, experimental design and approaches to small-screen design, and addressed potential issues with presentation in order to design a friendly PDA interface whose performance was analyzed with a postexperiment user satisfaction questionnaire. The results of this experiment show that the mobile-based classroom learning experience provides appropriate mobile tools to help students to become capable, self-reliant, self-motivated, and independent. The findings also demonstrate that variations among students’ preference for content are associated with differences in the display presentation mode, and that thelandscape interface is recommended for use in some contexts