Computer modeling promotes mechanistic reasoning when learners build and analyze models of complex systems to explore causal mechanisms and use models to generate patterns. StarLogo Nova (SLN), an agent-based modeling (ABM) environment, enables novice programmers to model a system's individual components and investigate its emergent, collective…

The incorporation of advanced information and communication technologies into the field of education has made the design and deployment of courses and instructional units more and more complicated. In order to support such complex task, methods and techniques have been proposed in the last years for the standardization, formalization and modelling…

With the development of the Information and Communication Technologies, great masses of information are published in the Web. In order to reuse, to share and to organise them in distance formation and e-learning frameworks, several research projects have been achieved and various standards and modelling languages developed. In our previous…

Serious virtual worlds (SVWs) represent a great opportunity for learning and should embed a lot of high-quality contextualised information so that the player can take the most from his or her exploration of the environment. This requires defining new methodologies and tools for effective production. We have investigated this issue in implementing…