Recent research indicates that the majority of postsecondary students in North America "feel overwhelming anxiety," an issue that has also been observed in many other regions and is negatively impacting students' academic performance and overall well-being. This article reports the results of our interdisciplinary analysis of innovative…

This article presents and analyzes existing taxonomies of virtual and augmented reality and demonstrates knowledge gaps and mixed terminology, which may cause confusion among educators, researchers, and developers. Several such occasions of confusion are presented. A methodology is then presented to construct a taxonomy of virtual reality and…

Finding proper ways to address learning about sustainability is a relevant issue. Sustainability learning has to face some inherent complexities, due to two main factors: the interdisciplinary domains related to sustainability issues, such as ecology, economics, politics, and culture, and the involvement of several social structures, such as…

Learning games have great potential to become an integral part of new classrooms of the future. One of the key reported benefits is the capacity to keep students deeply engaged during their learning process. Therefore, it is necessary to develop models that can measure quantitatively how learners are engaging with learning games to inform game…

Cyberspace odyssey (CSO) is a novel serious game supporting computer networking education by engaging students in a race to successfully perform various cybersecurity tasks in order to collect clues and solve a puzzle in virtual near-Earth three-dimensional space. Each team interacts with the game server through a dedicated client presenting a…

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…

This study proposes and applies a novel concept for an AI enhanced serious game collaborative environment as a supplementary learning tool in tertiary education. It is based on previous research that investigated pedagogical agents for a serious game in the OpenSim environment. The proposed AI features to support the serious game are the…

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.…

Even though digital learning games have become common in education, relatively little is known about the usefulness of game-based assessment. This paper aims to explore if a game-based math test can provide added value to math education with respect to cognitive and affective outcomes. We used in-game measures, embedded in the game called Semideus…

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…

Extant literature has largely not examined how users critically engage with their physical activity monitors, as objective data sense-making is often deemed superior to users' subjective realities. Our research, however, examines how middle-school youth encounter the representation of their data, as it is converted and actionable in an online…

The assessment of knowledge and learning progress in the context of game-based learning requires novel, noninvasive, and embedded approaches. In the present paper, we introduce a mathematical framework which relates the (problem solution) behavior of a learner in the game context to the learner's available and lacking competencies. We argue that a…