Humor and fear appeals are widely employed in traditional communication for educational purposes, but their exploitation in animated pedagogical agents has been scarcely explored. We studied the use of humor and fear appeals by a three-dimensional animated pedagogical agent that taught the same procedural knowledge in four conditions: i) humor…

We present a system that automatically generates deictic gestures for animated pedagogical agents (APAs). The system takes audio and text as input, which define what the APA has to say, and generates animated gestures based on a set of rules. The automatically generated gestures point to the exact locations of elements on a whiteboard nearby the…

Data Structures and Algorithms are a central part of Computer Science. Due to their abstract and dynamic nature, they are a difficult topic to learn for many students. To alleviate these learning difficulties, instructors have turned to algorithm visualizations (AV) and AV systems. Research has shown that especially engaging AVs can have an impact…

Computer-supported assessment tools can bring significant benefits to both students and teachers. When integrated in traditional education workflows, they may help to reduce the time required to perform the evaluation and consolidate the perception of fairness of the overall process. When integrated within on-line intelligent tutoring systems,…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder that impairs the development of social and communication skills. There is evidence that children with ASD prefer images of self over others. These studies may explain the effectiveness of video self-modeling (VSM), an evidence-based ASD intervention in which one learns by watching oneself…

This paper presents a web-based education platform for the visualization and animation of the digital logic design process. This includes the design of combinatorial circuits using logic gates, multiplexers, decoders, and look-up-tables as well as the design of finite state machines. Various configurations of finite state machines can be selected…

Assessment is a delicate task in the overall teaching process because it may require significant time and may be prone to subjectivity. Subjectivity is especially true for disciplines in which perceptual factors play a key role in the evaluation. In previous decades, computer-based assessment techniques were developed to address the…

In this paper, a new dance training system based on the motion capture and virtual reality (VR) technologies is proposed. Our system is inspired by the traditional way to learn new movements-imitating the teacher's movements and listening to the teacher's feedback. A prototype of our proposed system is implemented, in which a student can imitate…