Transactions on Edutainment IX

This publication concentrates on the production of a serious game on Microsoft’s XNA Studio, which illustrates both the potential of a cost-efficient, off-the-shelf development platform itself for programmers of a medium skillset (such as for example educators) but also the possibilities of designing to completion a fully functional game that can be used as part of secondary education chemistry curriculums in order to teach the important topic of the periodic table of elements. Additionally, a 15-subject pilot evaluation study of the game (titled Elemental) is included, which displays initial evidence that there can be educational benefits for the experiment participants exposed to the work.

Until recently virtual environments and videogame applications rarely incorporated any deep cultural or educational principles. Current research in the area of virtual reality applications, clearly indentify that they are extremely motivating for learners and therefore can be employed as an innovative, more accessible framework to deliver education while at the same time entertain the public. On the other hand, recent advances in videogame applications and human computer interfaces, demonstrate that a combination of game applications with effective learning principles and intuitive human computer interfaces could potentially transform virtual environments to a significant educational tool that could significantly facilitate the learning process. This paper describes an interactive virtual reality application that we developed for the museum of Thermopylae located at the site of the original battle, near the city of Lamia in Greece. We utilized storytelling techniques and principles of modern videogames to disseminate historical knowledge about the battle and the associated legends. We present the hardware and software components comprising the proposed installation, while we elaborate over the educational techniques designed to reinforce the strength of virtual reality technology as a mean of designing educational experiences in the context of cultural heritage related information.

This paper reports the feasibility of Elinor, a game-based system for stroke rehabilitation in the home. The Elinor prototype has been positively evaluated with respect to its usability, user acceptance and motivational factors as well as its rehabilitation effect. This paper reports the findings from the whole project. To summarize the results, we find that game factors can be used to enhance motivation for rehabilitation. We had positive results with respect to many of the rehabilitation measurements employed. For example, the assessment of motor and process skills was positive as were also the self-reported improvements in daily activities. Furthermore, it seems that an increased self-efficacy with respect to the belief that the treatment can have an effect is positive and expected to increase motivation to undergo necessary rehabilitation. The usability and perceived usefulness of the system were also positively evaluated and the subjects expressed a positive attitude towards the system as well as a belief in its usefulness.

The contribution of this paper identifies the importance of developing and designing tailored virtual places which older members of society can utilize easily and safely within this context; with a focused application of addressing social isolation, enabling wellbeing and improving edutainment. The paper also explores the complexities associated with engaging older people with virtual world’s experiences alongside the potential for new commercial approaches to design and delivery edutainment and wellbeing support initiatives in 3D immersive contexts through the implementation of next generational digital services.

Virtual Worlds (VWs) present considerable potential as future learning platforms, but further studies are required to assess their effectiveness in constructivist and collaborative learning situations. The paper investigates the suitability of VWs as a platform for hosting PBL (Problem-Based Learning) activities and explores their affordances in terms of collaboration support and learning effectiveness. We have designed an educational VW and developed a number of tools that support collaborative learning activities. Using this environment, we have conducted a PBL intervention that required from students to collaboratively design the user interface of a multimedia kiosk. We performed a thorough, formative, multi-method evaluation of the learning activity. The results reveal several encouraging findings about PBL and collaboration mediated by VWs, and lead to a series of recommendations.

Format-Store is a serious game application designed for training salesmen and managers in the context of a retail store or a larger supermarket. In this paper, we argue that a relevant way to train a salesperson to their daily activities (e.g. customer relationship management, store management and stock control) consists in immersing them in a 3d environment populated with realistic virtual customers. The first part of this paper presents the multiagent approach we apply to the design of the intelligent customers. Specifically, we analyse the contribution of the interaction-oriented methodology Ioda in facilitating the conception of a game for non computer-scientists by means of a user-friendly design tool and the automated implementation of the conceptual model. The second part describes the organisation of the game around scenarios modelled with respect to the pedagogical requirements. We discuss how the multiagent simulation is wrapped by several modules for the purpose of controlling the learning experience of the player.

Mini-languages is a branch of Educational Software for learning programming at an introductory level. On the other hand, participation, interaction and storylines make Educational Games motivating to young learners. The study presented here examined various widely known mini-languages with an emphasis on LOGO implementations and followed a combinational route to take advantage of both Game-Based Learning (GBL) and the use of mini-languages in the design of a new LOGO-like environment. PlayLOGO 3D is a video game with defined learning outcomes aiming to support GBL activities especially designed for children aged 6-13 years in the early stages of programming education. The Expert Review Method was used for initial evaluation based on a set of heuristics for usability, game play and educational effectiveness. Although the expert team found a few violations of heuristics criteria, evaluation results are very encouraging and prove that there is enough room to make programming education more fun.

Over the last few years we have witnessed a rapid development and popularisation of serious gaming. This field is becoming approved in not only education, science, medicine, religion or engineering, but also in the area of cultural heritage through serious heritage games. This can be utilised for virtual reconstructions and virtual museums and possibly used for education in the form of edutainment, comprising various techniques, such as storytelling, visual expression of information, interactivity and entertainment [19]. This paper demonstrates a new concept of using story guided virtual environments for cultural heritage virtual reconstruction, with live virtual guides in an interactive Flash format. First we compare the implementations of the same environments in x3D and Flash and then we extend the project with digital storytelling, where a user is guided through the whole application using both narrative, non-interactive, movie-like elements and interactive exploration of the virtual environment. The introduced results can be easily adopted for serious games development.

The work includes analyzing and simulating the techniques of traditional Chinese ink-wash landscape paintings, such as the ways of brush moving and ink painting, exploring the digital rendering modes with the characteristics of wrinkled-texture paintings. Besides realizing the simulation of traditional freehand ink-wash paintings by mixing the wrinkled-texture picture with the technique of modeling and rendering based on particle deposition and stacking. This study inherits and develops the traditional ink-wash painting’s aesthetic theory and aesthetics, and has great significance and reference value of the change and development of the Chinese ink-wash landscape paintings.

Electronic game is a rising resource which is used to develop the players’ multiple intelligences. This paper tested the intrapersonal intelligence of 192 middle school students who play role-playing game (RPG) by questionnaire, aiming at exploring the effects of RPG on intrapersonal intelligence. The results showed that RPG has a positive effect on students’ intrapersonal intelligence, and the effect is subject to factors such as age, frequency of playing games and RPG type. It concluded that Role-playing game could help improving students’ intrapersonal intelligence, and gave some suggestions about the development of RPG and students’ intrapersonal intelligence in the future. The study highlighted a new approach of developing middle school students’ multiple intelligences in the current educational environment.

This paper introduces the application of virtual technology in the design process of Lushan Virtual Digital Plant Museum. Based on virtual technology’s characteristics of immersion, interaction and imagination,the 360-degree panorama and the three-dimension model design of virtual technology are employed to achieve the function of this museum’s panoramic roaming and three-dimension plant interactive display, and demonstrate the broad prospect of virtual technology in the application of virtual digital museum.

This article puts forward a novel framework for pedestrian detection tasks, which proposing a model with both sparse reconstruction and class discrimination components, jointly optimized during dictionary learning. We present an efficient pedestrian detection system using mixing sparse features of HOG, FOG and CSS to combine into a Kernel classifier. Results presented on our data set show competitive accuracy and robust performance of our system outperforms current state-of-the-art work.

Chinese Medicated Diet (CMD) which combines the properties of food and medicine not only prevents and cures diseases but also prolongs lives. It is becoming more and more popular in modern society and in great demand. Facing the shortage of medicated diet knowledge in common people, this paper focuses on the design and development of an online software system for CMD: Chinese Medicated Diet System (CMDS). The design and implementation of CMDS are discussed as key issues including persistence layer and database access. The proposed demo provides an efficient way to popularize and internationalize the CMD. It should be enriched step by step and apply in daily life in the future.

The sacrificial ceremony for Confucius is one of the most important Chinese cultural heritages which could be protected by means of digital technology. A digitalized system, which was developed to reconstruct the musical dance performance of the ceremony, includes music analysis based on emotion model and action movement library based on a virtual model for the choreography with the motion capture technique, and the action correlation with music-dance match. The simulation results of the digitalized dance performance of the ceremony shows that the system allows people to make a better understanding of the cultural evolution.

This paper introduces a home design system with its great functions and framework design, including the scene management based on the Cell&Portal system, improved variance shadow mapping and the recently popular real-time rendering framework called deferred lighting. In the implementation details, we put in some useful improvements, such as compressing the Geometry Buffer and Lighting Buffer to decrease the video memory and bandwidth occupation with which the multi-render-target limitation has been dislodged, using the light volume stencil culling which is similar to the shadow volume algorithm to identify the lit pixels and modifying the physically correct shading model based on Fresnel term to adapt to the deferred lighting framework.

This paper proposes a visual object contour tracking algorithm using a multi-cue fusion particle filter. A novel contour evolution energy is proposed which integrates an incrementally learnt model of object appearance with a parametric snake model. This energy function is combined with a mixed cascade particle filter tracking algorithm which fuses multiple observation models for object contour tracking. Bending energy due to contour evolution is modelled using a thin plate spline (TPS). Multiple order graph matching is performed between contours in consecutive frames. Both of the above are taken as observation models for contour deformation; these models are fused efficiently using a mixed cascade sampling process. The dynamic model used in our tracking method is further improved by the use of optical flow. Experiments on real videos show that our approach provides high performance object contour tracking.

Presented in this paper is an immersive and interactive entertainment environment which integrates tiled display wall and motion tracking techniques. A fast calibration method is proposed to achieve geometry alignment and color consistency of the tiled display wall. A robust motion tracking algorithm is designed to obtain the player’s moving direction and speed from video streams captured by a web camera. The tracking results are finally used to control the avatar in a virtual scene. The proposed system provides a low-cost and easy to install human-computer interaction environment.

The radiance coming from the interior of an uncooled infrared camera has significant effect on the accuracy of temperature measurement. To remove the effect, this paper proposes a novel three-phase method, which is outlined below. First, from a set of samples, how the pixel value of each blackbody varies with the camera temperature is determined. Second, at the given camera temperature, the calibration function, describing how the pixel value varies with the temperature of blackbody is formed. Finally, with the aid of the calibration function, the temperature of the probe object can be determined by its pixel value. Experimental results show that with the method, the camera can measure the temperature of the object with an error of no more than 1°C.

Piying, the world’s intangible culture heritage, is an old Chinese art form and one of the origins of modern movie, which encountering the risk of extinction. The spirit of traditional Piying is to express rich emotion and stories through action change by artists. A cross-culture study was conducted to investigate the effect of Piying-induced emotion on heart rate and heart rate variability during Piying perception and performance. The result confirmed that Piying performance was far more effective in emotion induction than Piying perception. The results suggested Chinese are more fond of traditional Piying elements and American prefer experiencing interaction of Piying while the result of Japanese is between those of Chinese and American, they hope that there is a rule to follow in Piying show. Our approach is the first explorative emotion study on Piying art, which could be used as design mechanism to re-create and inherit Piying culture.

The scale of some datasets generated by simulations on tens of thousands of cores are gigabyte or larger per output step. It is imperative that efficient coupling of these simulations and parallel visualization. A patch-based data reorganization method was presented for this coupling through a parallel file system. Based on the method, simulation data sets in application codes are reorganized by patch and written into many files in parallel. These datasets in these files can be read directly by visualization software with low I/O overheads. For two real simulations on above 30000 cores, large-scale datasets have been generated and visualized efficiently.

The history of computer-based learning games has a story arc that rises dramatically, and then plummets steeply. In the early days of personal computers, creative minds drawn to the new medium explored a variety of approaches to learning games, ranging from behaviorist drill-and-practice exercises, to open-ended environments suitable for either exploration or construction. Early practitioners were inventing new forms, and even the fundamentally limited drill-and-practice games were infused with a measure of creative energy and humor. The late 1980s and mid 1990s were a heyday for the CDROM edutainment era. However, this era came to a crashing halt as the Internet dawned and the market for edutainment dried up in the late 1990s. Despite the downfall of the edutainment era there is new energy and perspective behind the idea of learning games. While edutainment of the 1990s style has gone, there is a new take on what learning games can be. In this era, we are finding that “making a game out of learning is most certainly not the way to approach the development of learning games. However, finding the fun in that learning” and devising ways to focus on and enhance that fun as a core game dynamic is a good strategy.