Aristidis Protopsaltis

Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg | FAU · Institut für Lern-Innovation

This research paper - together with similar papers developed in parallel by other research teams on various subtopics - aims to offer a basis for policy development and implementation at different governance levels and inform the work of the European Commission (EC) on teachers and school leaders towards a sustainable whole school approach for qual...

The use of serious games and game - based learning to develop new skills and knowledge in the context of social innovation education is a new and a promising endeavour. Social innovation education supports the empowerment and activation of students as social change makers. At the same time, the active engagem ent in socially impacted projects and a...

Over the last few years, Europe witnessed a rapid and massive expansion of e-learning courses. An increasing number of adults are following e-learning courses and MOOCs, with different motivations. Research has shown that online learning attracts learners from medium and higher socioeconomic and education background [1], so a challenge is to open u...

This paper presents the findings of the H2020 NEMESIS project that aims to design, test and validate a consolidated approach for embedding Social Innovation in Education. Social Innovation Education (SIE) is a new educational approach that aims to empower students to take action for a more democratic and sustainable society. During the academic yea...

The development of new skills and knowledge often leads to challenges. The emotional experience of the learner while confronted with the learning object is crucial for the learning process. Learners who approach a subject with interest and curiosity, and thus value the learning activity with positive emotions, achieve a more promising effect than p...

Although in the last decades a rich literature around Social Innovation has emerged, Social Innovation Education (SIE) is a new concept and has been relatively under-investigated, while there is no clear definition explaining what SIE entails. This paper presents the first attempts of the EU funded NEMESIS project to design a non-prescriptive learn...

The current paper presents the Quiz Cube application and its evaluation. The Quiz Cube application is an AR mobile learning application for students and teachers to easily make and use AR UI system using fiducial marker cubes. AR as a platform is just now reaching its full potential. Since smartphones and mobile devices are now at a sufficiently la...

The use of perceptual inputs is an emerging area within HCI that suggests a developing Perceptual User Interface (PUI) that may prove advantageous for those involved in mobile serious games and immersive social network environments. Since there are a large variety of input devices, software platforms, possible interactions, and myriad ways to combi...

The use of perceptual inputs is an emerging area within HCI that suggests a developing Perceptual User Interface (PUI) that may prove advantageous for those involved in mobile serious games and immersive social network environments. Since there are a large variety of input devices, software platforms, possible interactions, and myriad ways to combi...

The current paper present a serious game prototype developed to assist the learning of programming at a university level. The game is called EdCCDroid, and is based on Code-Combat, currently the only game field targeting audience for programming learning compared to other games that would see users touch on the purely logically side of programming...

This paper reports on a conducted study, measuring the perceptions of post-graduate students on the effectiveness of serious games in the classroom. Four games were used (Project Management Exercise, "Winning Margin" Business Simulation, Management of Change and Management of Product Design and Development) with scenarios ranging from product desig...

The weSPOT project aims at propagating scientific inquiry as the approach for science learning and teaching in combination with today’s curricula and teaching practices The project focuses on inquiry-based learning with a theoretically sound and technology supported personal inquiry approach and it contains three main development aspects: (a) defin...

The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with interfaces is an active challenge field in the industry over the past decades and has opened the way to communicate with the means of verbal, hand and body gestures using the latest technologies for a variety of different applications in areas such as video games, training and simulation. However, accurate...

This paper reports on the main piloting of the Start Up EU project (http://startup-eu.net/). Start Up EU targets secondary schools and simulates the process of starting up a high tech company. The project developed a series of mini-games, a Web2.0 platform and a collaborative competition for students, between 14 and 18 years of age. 243 students pa...

weSPOT is a new European initiative proposing a novel approach for personal and social inquiry-based learning in secondary and higher education. weSPOT aims at enabling students to create their mash-ups out of cloud-based tools and services in order to perform scientific investigations. Students will also be able to share their inquiry accomplishme...

Research in technology-enhanced learning (TEL) throughout the last decade has largely focused on sharing and reusing educational resources and data. This effort has led to a fragmented landscape of competing metadata schemas, such as IEEE LOM or ADL SCORM, and interface mechanisms, such as OAI-PMH, SQI and REST-ful services in general. More recentl...

The present paper reports on the pre-piloting of the StartUp_EU Lifelong Learning European Project. StartUp_EU is a project for secondary schools that simulating the excitement and creative innovation of starting up a new company. The project developed a series of mini-games, an encompassing Web2.0 platform and a collaborative competition for secon...

Game-based approaches to learning are increasingly being recognized as having the potential to stimulate intrinsic motivation amongst learners. Whilst a range of examples of effective serious games exist, creating the high-fidelity content with which to populate a serious game is resource-intensive task. To reduce this resource requirement, researc...

E-commerce is a fundamental method of doing business, such that for a firm to say it is trading at all in the modern market-place it must have some element of on-line presence. Coupled with this is the explosion of the “population” of Massively Multiplayer On-line Role Playing Games and other shared virtual environments. Many suggest this will lead...

mEducator 3.0 is a content sharing approach for medical education, based on Linked Data principles. Through standardization, it enables sharing and discovery of medical information. Overall the mEducator project seeks to address the following two different approaches, mEducator 2.0, based on web 2.0 and ad-hoc Application Programmers Interfaces (AP...

Serious games represent the state-of-the-art in the convergence of electronic gaming technologies with instructional design principles and pedagogies. Despite the value of high-fidelity content in engaging learners and providing realistic training environments, building games which deliver high levels of visual and functional realism is a complex,...

Games are increasingly recognized for their educational potential. However, when used as a learning resource, games can differ substantially from other educational media. They often combine high-fidelity audio and video content with experiential, social, or exploratory pedagogy. As educators increasingly turn to technology to support the delivery a...

Scientific inquiry is at the core of the curricula of schools and universities across Europe. weSPOT is a new European initiative proposing a cloud-based approach for personal and social inquiry. weSPOT aims at enabling students to create their mashups out of cloud-based tools in order to perform scientific investigations. Students will also be abl...

Serious games have recognized potential as a means to tackle many challenges in education, ranging from stimulating increased learner motivation, to transferring challenging concepts in a novel and engaging form. They are commonly shown to work most effectively in blended approaches to learning, whereby the game plays a core role in a wider pedagog...

Simulation based games attempt to replicate real life or fiction scenarios for the purposes of learning, training, investigating or predicting results. This paper presents a case study of a simulation based on terrestrial which are primarily used by Explosive Ordinance Disposal Units (E.O.D.) in the investigation and disposal of bomb threats in Nin...

Games are used in education at all levels for quite long time. Most educational games intend to introduce trainees to a new subject and present them with new knowledge when others allow then to acquire and improve certain skills. This paper presents the "Teaching Game", an implementation that explores the possibility to create a simulation of a cla...

Serious games are very content-rich forms of educational media, often combining high fidelity visual and audio content with diverse pedagogic approaches. This paper introduces scenario-based serious games repurposing and demonstrates repurposing a serious game into new learning objects. The process uses the scenario editor called "mEditor". Two cas...

In recent years, alternate reality games have entered the mainstream as a new form of entertainment. The Living Stories project is the first alternate reality game in the UK, which addresses environmental issues. Living Stories combines social networking sites such as Face book and Twitter with Second Life, to create a platform, which allows social...

The increasing pervasiveness of digital technology is having a profound effect on how younger generations interact, play, and learn. The use of electronic games for education (game-based learning) promotes an agile, immersive, and stimulating form of learning that fosters learner engagement and motivation. This chapter focuses on GBL for knowledge...

This paper, summarises the Creative Learning with Serious Games workshop that took place in the Fun and Games 2010 conference. The workshop discussed innovative methodological approaches to Serious Games for creative learning. A special emphasis was given to state-ofthe-art research work and cross-discipline approaches (e.g. the mix of Storytelling...

The talk will introduce Serious Games to the audience, discuses the current state of the art in the field with the use of case studies. Furthermore the different pedagogical approaches to learning with the use of serious games will be presented and discussed. Finally, some of the current projects at the Serious Games Institute will be show cased.

This paper investigates a range of challenges faced in the design of a serious game aimed at teaching history in situ, through the use of an immersive, open virtual environment. In the context of this paper, such an environment is describedas an exploratory, expansive virtual world within which a user may interact in a non-linear and situated fashi...

This paper investigates a range of challenges faced in the design of a serious game, teaching history to a player immersed in an `open' virtual environment. In the context of this paper, such an environment is described as an exploratory, expansive virtual world within which a user may interact in a non-linear, situated fashion with both the enviro...

Serious games are one of the most content-rich forms of educational media, often combining high fidelity visual and audio content, novel interaction paradigms, and diverse pedagogic approaches. This article describes exploratory work towards identifying the key issues faced when repurposing serious games in order to enable their use and reuse in th...

This paper presents evidence about expertise in teaching and the use of ICT (Information Communication Technology) to communicate information. Fifty four (54) expert teachers and teaching assistants from infant, primary and secondary schools participated in the study. Participants were nominated by their peers as 'outstanding' in their practice. Se...

The effect of gender in learning has often been the focus of research because of its potential implications in academic achievement. However, the effect of gender in hypertext reading has not been thoroughly investigated. The Web in general and the hypertext in particular has modified the way people access and use information. This paper reports th...

SIGDOC comes from a technical writing tradition, where literature and rhetoric play an important role. Communication is now giving a broader focus, especially as influences come from graphical design, web design, digital sound or digital multimedia. In Lisbon, we expect to discuss this focus of SIGDOC. This is an important transition that is being...

The effect of gender in academic achievement has often been the focus of research because of its potential implications. However, the Web has modified the way people access and use information. The present study examines the differences between males' and females' reading behaviour in hypertexts. The study focuses on text based electronic documents...

What is the Design of Communication? In this panel, four SIGDOC members from different areas come together to discuss the interdisciplinary area of DOC.

The present study examined the influence of different reading goals on reading in a hypertext environment. The study focused on text based electronic documents. The study was an independent samples design experiment with three different conditions. Ninety participants read the hypertext allocated into three different conditions and then, all answer...

This paper reports on a study that is concerned with the cognitive aspects of reading in a hypertext environment. The study focuses on text based electronic documents. A cognitive model for hypertext document reading proposed in an earlier work is here developed and validated with the use of think aloud protocols. Navigational strategies that reade...

This study is concerned with the cognitive aspects of discourse processing in an electronic environment. A cognitive model for hypertext reading is proposed and validated with the use of think aloud protocols. The model, at this stage of development, is only concerned with the general cognitive processes that take place during reading a hypertext....

This paper reports on a pilot study that is concerned with the cognitive aspects of reading in an electronic environment. The study focuses on text based electronic documents. A cognitive model for hypertext document reading proposed in an earlier work is here developed and validated with the use of think aloud protocols. The model is concerned wit...