This design case describes design decisions and their impacts during three redesigns of an educational game called the "Rocks and Minerals Challenge." This game was developed as a laboratory supplement for the rocks and minerals component of a university-based geology course. The game has evolved through three distinct design phases:…

Despite the growth in the use of serious games to train and evaluate cross-cultural competence, few studies have examined the content and dialogue development methods associated with these training systems. This study presents a framework for generating content for serious games targeting culturally appropriate communication and an evaluation of a…

Serious games seem to be a promising alternative to traditional practices for learning. Recently, their use in computer science education and learning programming became more widespread. Actually, many students in programming courses have difficulties to master all required competencies and skills especially at introductory level and games have…

Carefully engineered playable games can serve as vehicles for students and practitioners to learn and explore the programming of advanced computer architectures to execute applications, such as high performance computing (HPC) and complex, inter-networked, distributed systems. The article presents families of playable games that are grounded in…

Multiuser immersive learning scenarios hold strong potential for lifelong learning as they can support the acquisition of higher order skills in an effective, efficient, and attractive way. Existing virtual worlds, game development platforms, and game engines only partly cater for the proliferation of such learning scenarios as they are often…

In recent times, the role of entrepreneurs has been recognized to be of great significance in accelerating the pace of growth of economic development of any country. Internet-enabled technologies have also challenged existing business models in numerous market sectors and offered innovation opportunities to a variety of stakeholders--not least…

In the field of electricity markets, the development of training tools for engineers has been extremely useful. A novel experimental economics approach based on a computational Web platform of an electricity market is proposed here for the practical teaching of electrical engineering students. The approach is designed to diminish the gap that…

Tutorial Dialog Systems that employ Conversational Agents (CAs) to deliver instructional content to learners in one-on-one tutoring settings have been shown to be effective in multiple learning domains by multiple research groups. Our work focuses on extending this successful learning technology to collaborative learning settings involving two or…

Systems analysis and design is a standard course offering within information systems programs and often an important lecture topic in Information Systems core courses. Given the persistent difficulty that organizations experience in implementing systems that meet their requirements, it is important to help students in these courses get a tangible…

Energy education has been conducted to equip learners with relevant energy conservation knowledge for many years. However, learners seldom put the knowledge into practice and even have few ideas about how to reduce energy consumption. To this end, there is a need to address this issue to improve the efficiency of energy education. One of the…

The "Technology Outlook Australian Tertiary Education 2013-2018: An NMC Horizon Project Regional Analysis" reflects a collaborative research effort between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and Open Universities Australia to help inform Australian educational leaders about significant developments in technologies supporting teaching,…

This paper reflects a multi-year collaborative effort between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and Griffith University to help inform Australian educational leaders about significant developments in technologies supporting teaching, learning, and research in tertiary education. The research underpinning the report makes use of the NMC's Delphi-based…

This paper reflects a collaborative effort between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the JISC Innovation Support Centres, CETIS and UKOLN. The research underpinning the report makes use of the NMC's Delphi-based process for bringing groups of experts to a consensus viewpoint, in this case around the impact of emerging technologies on teaching,…

The study of database systems is typically core in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes related to computer science and information systems. However, one component of this curriculum that many learners have difficulty with is database analysis and design, an area that is critical to the development of modern information systems. This paper…

This paper presents an empirical study involving initiatives that encouraged students to log onto online courses in entrepreneurship delivered by the University of Glamorgan. The aim of the research was to explore items of interest to the online students that may increase participation in the forums and hence potentially enhanced engagement with…