Computer programming has for decades posed several difficulties for students of all educational levels. A number of teaching approaches have been proposed over the years but none seems to fulfil the needs of students nowadays. Students use computers mainly for playing games and the Internet and as quite a few researchers state this aspect of…

Computer and smartphone-based applications for second language (L2) learning have become popular tools, being integrated in many classroom-based courses and adopted by the public at large. Yet, despite a significant body of research that suggests that individuals differ in their ability to learn L2, it is still unclear what factors predict…

Digital games can make unique and powerful contributions to K-12 science education, but much of that potential remains unrealized. Research evaluating games for learning still relies primarily on pre- and post-test data, which limits possible insights into more complex interactions between game design features, gameplay, and formal assessment.…

In this paper we present a software platform called Chatbot designed to introduce high school students to Computer Science (CS) concepts in an innovative way: by programming chatbots. A chatbot is a bot that can be programmed to have a conversation with a human or robotic partner in some natural language such as English or Spanish. While…

This study examines the influence of players' age, gender, and gaming preferences and habits (from now on, "gaming preferences") on the effectiveness of a specific videogame that has been designed to increase the interest towards classical theater among teenagers. Using a validated instrument, participants were divided into four groups…