EnCity:A serious game for empowering young people with Down's syndrome

Down’s syndrome (also known as trisomy 21) is a genetic disorder caused by the presence of a third copy of chromosome 21 in a baby’s cell. With education and proper care the quality of life of these people can be improved, and with the right support people with Down’s syndrome can have an active role in the community. In this paper we examine how a virtual reality serious game, the EnCity game, could engage and encourage young people with Down’s syndrome to have a more active involvement in the community. Players should complete mini games related to everyday tasks (e.g. preparing a meal, shopping in the supermarket, paying a bill, buying a ticket to visit a museum or gallery), and through these mini-games players will gain the appropriate training and encouragement for leading their lives without requiring help from their families or social services

Assistive Awareness in Smart Grids

Peer Reviewe

GreenMate: A Serious Game Educating Children about Energy Efficiency

Improving the energy efficiency and reducing the CO2 emissions are key strategic objectives for governments on an international level. Although children represent the future energy consumers and efforts have been made to enhance their understanding of energy consumption, there is a lack of initiatives focused on assessing children's awareness regarding energy usage at home and school. Serious games present a highly effective approach to educate and raise children's awareness about energy production and consumption; they are widely used to simulate real-world scenarios, inform or raise players' awareness, and stimulate their problem-solving abilities. Moreover, they assist players in visualising their actions and intuitively exploring different events. This paper discusses the development of a serious game, the GreenMate game, which visually portrays the daily activities and experiences of a primary school student. It incorporates progressive levels to enhance comprehension and knowledge of the diverse factors influencing the growing energy crisis, as well as strategies for managing and mitigating them. According to our experimental findings, the GreenMate game can be used as a productive educational tool to effectively foster desired changes in children's behavior regarding energy consumption

Collective awareness in self-organising socio-technical systems

A collective action situation involves a group of people working together for a common good or to resolve a common problem, even if their individual goals may be in conflict with the common goal, and each other’s goals. Moreover, it may be difficult for individuals to recognise that they are involved in a collective action situation, or that their (relatively small) individual actions have an impact on the collective. A community energy system for local energy generation and distribution is an example where community members need to collaborate on energy allocation, but may be ‘collectively unaware’ of incipient problems, such as blackouts, that originate from depletion of the fixed amounts of energy that are available. Even if aware of the incipient problem, they may be equally unaware of how their individual actions contribute to the collective goal of resolving it. In this thesis, we propose that socio-technical systems can be used for computer - supported collective action, and in particular, that collective awareness can be enhanced by appropriate features of the system interface, therefore increasing the opportunities and prospects for successful collective action. Specifically, collective awareness is defined as an attribute of communities that helps them solve collective action problems. In relation to Elinor Ostrom’s institutional design principles for self-governing institutions, this definition is translated into requirements for interface design and display which promote collective awareness, including different interface elements, visualisation, social networking, feedback and incentives. To test the hypothesis, we design and implement a serious game for a community energy system, integrating the Imprudence viewer to support an immersive 3D environment, the Presage2 agent-based simulation platform to model different components, and OpenSimulator application server to support real-time interactions. In this game, the participants have to avoid a collective blackout by individually reducing their energy consumption by synchronising and coordinating their actions. We then design and implement an interface to the game with a set of features that meet these interface requirements, and configure the system. Finally, we report the results of the experiments, which show that when visualisation, social networking, feedback and incentives are added to the serious game interface, users become ‘collectively aware’ of potential energy problems and they successfully coordinate their behaviour to avoid them. These results highlight the significant potential of serious games and gamification in the development of infrastructure support for community energy systems, and also indicate a more beneficial approach to the use of smart meters in such systems: i.e. not just as a monitor for pricing and consumption, but as a key enabler for direct action, feedback and incentivisation. Furthermore, it provides the basis for defining a set of interface design principles for ‘smarter’ socio-technical systems which promote successful computer-supported collective action.Open Acces

Enabling collective awareness of energy use via a social serious game

Serious games are digital games, simulations and virtual environments designed for primary purposes (e.g. teaching, learning and training) other than pure entertainment. They are experiential environments where features such as thought-provoking, informative or stimulating are as important, if not more so, than fun or entertainment. A number of serious games have been developed for energy systems that act as educational tools and help energy consumers to better understand concepts such as resource allocation, electricity prices and grid sustainability. This paper discusses the development of a serious game, the Social Mpower, which visualises a community energy system in which players should avoid energy problems (i.e. blackouts) by individually reducing their energy consumption and sustain the Common-Pool Resource (CPR) of their community. Our experimental hypothesis is that if players are “collective aware” of their individual and community consumption, they consume energy in a more efficient and effective way and therefore, they can avoid potential energy problems (i.e. blackouts). Our experimental results show that Social Mpower can be productively used as an educational tool to bring a desired change in people’s behaviour towards energy consumption

Trust & Fair Resource Allocation in Community Energy Systems

The energy sector faces numerous challenges, including rising electricity costs and inconsistent services due to network overload, often requiring the involvement of a central network operator to address these issues. However, a user-centric approach that prioritizes demand-side management, exemplified by decentralized Community Energy Systems (dCES), presents a promising solution to energy distribution and supply network challenges. dCES can be conceptualized as a small-scale, dynamic distribution network seamlessly integrated into the broader framework of the Smart Grid. In this paradigm, prosumers play an active role, as they must contribute to and draw from a shared energy resource pool, with the overarching goal of avoiding depletion. Specifically, various individuals with different energy consumption patterns and preferences work together to solve collective action problems, i.e., blackouts. Motivated firstly by fair resource allocation, and secondly by the idea that trust is a crucial factor for successful collective action among diverse individuals, we developed a suitable Multi-Agent System (MAS) for dCES to prevent resource depletion. Our experimental results show that introducing trust into dCES can lead to successful collective action, resulting in stable energy networks

Digital game enables active user participation in SmartGrids

[EN]Computational awareness can promote sustainability and efficiency in electricity use by encouraging cooperative and collaborative user participation.Peer reviewe

Taxonomy of a gamified lesson path for STEM education:The beaconing approach

21st Century learning focuses on different skills and expertise that learners should develop for a successful life and career, and these are usually organised into four main categories: ways of thinking (e.g. creativity, innovation, critical thinking, problem-solving); ways of working (e.g. communication and collaboration); tools for working (e.g. digital literacy) and living in the world (e.g. citizenship, social responsibility, awareness). Learning should be reshaped to better match these requirements and prepare learners for open societies where learning will be lifelong and based on critical-thinking, cultural awareness, flexibility and adaption to changes. This paper introduces a new approach developed under the scope of the Beaconing project, which aims to contextualise the teaching and learning process, connecting it with problem-based mechanics within STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). The aim is to provide the missing connection between STEM subjects and real-world interactions and applications, and it is developed with inputs from teachers, researchers, educational experts and industry leaders. The pedagogical foundation is based on problem-based learning, in which active learning is in the centre and learners have to work with different tools and resources in order to solve problems (quests). Teachers facilitate, assess and author pervasive and gamified learning activities (missions). And these quests are gamified in order to provide non-linear game plots. This paper discusses the taxonomy for the Beaconing lesson path, which includes specific categories such as STEM competencies, learning objectives, pedagogical resources, rewards, narratives, game plots, location-based activities and game parameters. The lesson paths developed with the stakeholders will be populated with gamified learning activities such as mini-games, location-based mini-games, location-based activities and physical activities. The lesson paths will scaffold learners through self-directed and independent study, extending the learning experience beyond the classroom settings and complementing existing methods of teaching. The gamified lesson path taxonomy provides the backbone to the Beaconing platform and the associated components. This approach is adoptable and adaptable to various learning objectives