Manuel Gentile

• Computer Engineering
• Researcher at Italian National Research Council

In this work, starting from the social practice theory, we identified two kinds of creativity: a situational creativity that takes place when, starting from a defined situation, a social practice is played; and a creativity of habit that concerns the agents' capacity for generating new practices from habit when the situation is not defined or is un...

Although several investigations of spatial reasoning and mental rotation skills have been conducted in research areas linked to STEM education, to the best of our knowledge, few of these studies have examined the relationship between spatial reasoning and computational thinking. Given this gap in the literature, the present study investigates the r...

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into educational practices offers numerous opportunities to improve teaching, learning, and assessment. However, for these tools to be used effectively, it is critical to address the role of teachers, their professional development, and the misconceptions that may hinder the adoption of AI technologie...

The relationship between teacher and learners is one of the most critical el�ements in the educational context. Technological developments and, specif�ically, artificial intelligence have deeply challenged the classical teacher-stu�dent-teacher interaction models. Moreover, recent developments related to large language models and generative AI alr...

Recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence and, in particular, the rapid and pervasive spread of generative artificial intelligence tools, pose numerous significant challenges to the education field. Research activity in this area is generally aimed at understanding the impact of such innovations on learning and teaching processes and...

In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, cybersecurity education for children is paramount. The SuperCyberKids project, funded under the EU Erasmus+ programme, aims to address this need by developing a comprehensive educational ecosystem for children aged 8 to 13 and their teachers. Central to this initiative is the SuperCyberKids Learning Framew...

From early childhood, children begin to explore and interact with the physical environment, gradually improving their spatial skills. Understanding how this process occurs is essential for teachers because they can effectively support the development of these skills in the educational context. Indeed, corporeity is an increasingly central dimension...

Il dibattito sull’introduzione delle nuove tecnologie nelle pratiche di insegnamento è da sempre molto acceso; nondimeno, con l’avvento dell’Intelligenza Artificiale, la figura dell’insegnante è stata interessata da importanti cambiamenti tali da richiedere una formazione adeguata. Se fino ad oggi l’ausilio ai processi di apprendimento negli spazi...

1 Introduction. Personalized Learning (PL) is a multilayered concept and several definitions are currently available in existing literature. PL refers to an educational approach able to meet the individual needs and interests of each student. By differentiating instruction, teachers can address various modes of learning, adapt to different skill...

Through a systematic analysis of the literature, this study analyzes the change in the teacher's role triggered by the integration of AI into educational systems. The picture offered by the systematic analysis of the literature conducted in this study reveals a less than total awareness of the urgency with which the challenges imposed by AI in the...

The editorial of this issue of the International Journal of Serious Games is the last one signed by our Editor in Chief and Founder, Prof. Alessandro De Gloria. Alessandro passed away in Genova, Italy, on March 20th, few days after his 68th birthday. He founded the Serious Games Society and served as its first President, then as Honorary President....

This paper describes the model of social practice as a theoretical framework to manage conversation with the specific goal of training physicians in communicative skills. To this aim, the domain reasoner that manages the conversation in the Communicate! \cite{jeuring} serious game is taken as a basis. Because the choice of a specific Social Practic...

This study investigates the effectiveness of a 6-month parent-mediated early intervention telehealth program for children with an autism spectrum disorder. The participants comprised a total of 27 parents. The findings showed that participation in the program promotes parents’ empowerment and reduce parental stress and a general improvement in the...

We present a storytelling robot, controlled via the ACT-R cognitive architecture, able to adopt different persuasive techniques and ethical stances while conversing about some topics concerning COVID-19. The main contribution of the paper consists in the proposal of a needs-driven model that guides and evaluates, during the dialogue, the use (if an...

The mental rotation ability is an essential spatial reasoning skill in human cog-nition and has proven to be an essential predictor of mathematical and STEM skills, critical and computational thinking. Despite its importance, little is known about when and how mental rotation processes are activated in games explicitly targeting spatial reasoning t...

The abrupt interruption of face-to-face educational activities imposed by the Italian Government in response to the Covid-19 emergency required a rapid switch to remote schooling to guarantee continuity in education. This paper explores the family’s perception about the organization of remote schooling and its impact on learning. In particular, the...

Metaphors represent a powerful cognitive tool through which it is possible to facilitate the understanding of abstract concepts or concepts belonging to unfamiliar domains. In the field of Serious Games (SGs), metaphors connect the user’s previous experience in the game domain to the information load that is intended to be conveyed. This paper pres...

This contribute investigates how Emergency Remote Education (ERE) impacted families during the spring 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, and in particular, the extent to which the impact of ERE on families, measured in terms of space and equipment sharing, moderates the effect of student and family characteristics on students' engagement. The study derived fr...

We present a storytelling robot, controlled via the ACT-R cognitive architecture, able to adopt different persuasive techniques and ethical stances while conversing about some topics concerning COVID-19. The main contribution of the paper consists in the proposal of a needs-driven model that guides and evaluates, during the dialogue, the use (if an...

Purpose of Review The theory of consciousness is a subject that has kept scholars and researchers challenged for centuries. Even today it is not possible to define what consciousness is. This has led to the theorization of different models of consciousness. Starting from Baars’ Global Workspace Theory, this paper examines the models of cognitive ar...

In this work, we present the results of a role-playing game experience carried out with a group of 9- to 12-year-old children during the COVID-19 emergence. The ‘harmony in education’ approach has been used to adapt the game design to the constraints imposed by the online context and the young age of the students involved. The results show the effe...

It is a great pleasure for us to introduce this issue of the IJSG, which is dedicated to the Games and Learning Alliance Conference (GaLA Conf) that was held in Athens, November 27-29, 2019. Almost 70 participants converged in this beautiful, historic city in order to share knowledge and experiences related to serious games and gamification, their...

This paper provides a preliminary analysis of the possible role of cognitive architectures in the field of Serious Games. The seminal works that explore the use of Cognitive Architecture in games will be analyzed in the light of an emerging perspective of the games AI research area. Finally, an initial proposal of application of Cognitive Architect...

The relationship between the development of 21st-century skills and game-based learning is a field to explore. Among the 21-st century skills, critical thinking is one of the most analyzed skills. This study aims to deepen the relationship between learning and disposition to critical thinking (DCT) in the context of Serious Games (SGs). In particul...

This issue contains seven selected articles, which gives an overview of the rich field of serious games. So among the topics covered in this issue there are: gamification of learning experiences, serious games in everyday life, artificial intelligence as a means to significantly increase the effects of serious games, understanding the effect of lea...

Background: Quality of life (QoL) is an important outcome in the management of children with asthma. Mobile Health (m-Health) and Therapeutic Education Programs (TEPs) are increasingly recognized as essential components of pediatric asthma management to improve disease outcomes. Objective: To evaluate the effect of an education program (MyTherap...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Games and Learning Alliance, GALA 2019, held in Athens, Greece, in November 2019. The 38 regular papers presented together with 19 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 76 submissions. The papers cover the following topics: serious game design an...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Games and Learning Alliance, GALA 2018, held in Palermo, Italy, in December 2018. The 38 revised regular papers presented together with 9 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 68 submissions. The papers cover the following topics: games for skill...

In this work we propose a cognitive architecture, based on the Social Practice (SP) theory, aimed at the modeling of socially adaptive robots, able to interact with people, recognizing and interpreting the specific social context where it is acting. The proposed social robot is able to recognize and interpret social signs during ongoing social prac...

Educational activities based on dance can support interest in comprehension of concepts from maths, geometry, physics, bio-mechanics and computational thinking. In this work, we discuss a possible use of a dancing humanoid robot as an innovative technology to support and enhance STEAM learning activities.

In the area of consumer robots that need to have rich social interactions with humans, one of the challenges is the complexity of computing the appropriate interactions in a cognitive, social and physical context. We propose a novel approach for social robots based on the concept of Social Practices. By using social practices robots are able to be...

uManager is a typical management/construction game aimed to foster entrepreneurial skills in young students in which the user has to construct and manage a holiday resort. The game model connects the GMs with the Levels and Tasks to give to the game designer the maximum flexibility in the definition of a learning path.

uManager is a typical management/construction game aimed to foster entrepreneurial skills in young students in which the user has to construct and manage a holiday resort. The game model connects the GMs with the Levels and Tasks to give to the game designer the maximum flexibility in the definition of a learning path.

Starting from the social practice theory, we identify the features required for a conversational agent to show a form of "social intelligence ." Accordingly, we analyze some of the most known open source technologies, focusing on their potential to implement a social chatbot.

Educational activities based on dance can support interest in comprehension of concepts from maths, geometry, physics, bio-mechanics and computational thinking. In this work, we discuss a possible use of a dancing humanoid robot as an innovative technology to support and enhance STEAM learning activities.

This paper analyses the connection between spatial reasoning and STEM education from the point of view of embodied theories of cognition. A new learning model based on the use of a humanoid robot is presented with the aim of teaching and learning basic STEM concepts in a fruitful and engaging fashion.

This paper arises from some remarks within the field of Serious Games about the lacks of an effective and suitable framework for supporting both the design and the analysis of serious games. Such an absence recurs as the leading argument against the use of serious games as useful educational tools. The main aim of the paper is to define a methodol...

Abstract The Communication from the European Commission entitled "Entrepreneurship Action Plan 2020" highlights the role of Entrepreneurship Education (EE) as a key strategy for stimulating economic growth in Europe. As stated in the report “Entrepreneurship Education at School in Europe”, EE is not yet sufficiently integrated into the school...

This paper proposes a methodological framework to support the design of educational games based on a semantic frame analysis. Starting from a Frame Semantics point of view, the authors provide a deepen analysis of game mechanics definitions using the key concept of verb. To demonstrate the advantages of the proposed model an example is reported to...

Several serious games have been proposed to practice communication strategies in formal contexts. Intelligent virtual agents (IVA) can be used to show the player the effects of a conversational move. In this paper we discuss the key role of using social context for the virtual agents in these serious games. Social practices are exploited to bundle...

Conference presentation for the paper ”A semantic Frame approach to support Serious Game Design”

This work presents the first results of a research project seeking to build a simulation model able to reproduce the differences of Italian students’ performance at regional level. A preliminary qualitative cause-and-effect model defines the main variable involved in the inter-generational skill formation processes, as well as their interplay with...

Un modello di formazione continua in medicina basato sull’utilizzo di funzionalità di comunicazione e cooperazione integrate nel Fascicolo Sanitario Elettronico.

This paper describes the model of social practice as a theoretical framework to manage conversation with the specific goal of training physicians in communicative skills. To this aim, the domain reasoner that manages the conversation in the Communicate! [1] serious game is taken as a basis. Because the choice of a specific Social Practice to follow...

Traditional chatbots lack the capability to correctly manage conversations according to the social context. However a dialogue is a joint activity that must consider both individual and social processes. In this work we propose a model of a social chatbot able to choose the most suitable dialogue plans according to what in sociological literature i...

Within a Smart Learning Environment (SLE) learners are involved in a new learning process tailored to create a continuum of education by extending the current educational formal settings to real-life informal learning context. The goal of this paper is to describe the Cognitive Architecture (CA) of a Personal Intelligent Coach able to manage learni...

There is an increasing social pressure to train medical students with a level of competency sufficient to face clinical practice already at the end of their curriculum. The case-based learning (CBL) is an efficient teaching method to prepare students for clinical practice through the use of real or realistic clinical cases. In this regard, the Elec...

Background: Pediatric Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire (PAQLQ) provides detailed information on QoL in asthmatic children whereas childhood Asthma Control Test (C-ACT) is the most validated instrument for asthma control. No study assessed the relationship between C-ACT and QoL in children by means of those instruments. Aim of the study was to...

There is an increasing social pressure to train medical students with a level of competency sufficient to face clinical practice already at the end of their curriculum. The case-based learning (CBL) is an efficient teaching method to prepare students for clinical practice through the use of real or realistic clinical cases. In this regard, the Elec...

Background: This study is based on the evidence that tests can be used as an educational tool to enhance learning, not just as an evaluation tool. There is a growing body of research that shows that participating in repeated testing improves learning, a phenomenon defined as Test-Enhanced Learning. The aim of the present study was to analyse the e...

“Neuroeducation” and “Educational Neuroscience” are labels that refer to a branch of knowledge which is the subject of a rather heated debate amongst researchers. This new area, arising from an exchange between Neuroscience and Educational Sciences, is generally and mistakenly described as a context where educationally relevant evidences from neuro...

The demand to support special educative needs has considerably risen recently, highlighting the longing of customized learning paths. According to the “Policy guidelines on inclusion in education” (UNESCO 2009, Paris), “the concept of inclusion focuses on the learning environments and it involves changes and modifications in content, approaches, st...

Word space models are used to encode the semantics of natural language elements by means of high dimensional vectors [23]. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) methodology [15] is well known and widely used for its generalization properties. Despite of its good performance in several applications, the model induced by LSA ignores dynamic changes in sente...

The main aim of this paper is to propose a model, which can explain Italian regional variability in the PISA 2009 data. In the literature, many models have studied the impact on the PISA scores of individual variables, often related to gender, socio-economic status, and motivational factors. In some cases, other variables have been introduced to ta...

Entrepreneurship Education aims to help students acquire skills and knowledge that are crucial for the development of an entrepreneurial mindset. The article describes a blended model based on the use of a serious game within the framework of the EU-funded project “I can…I cannot…I go!” Rev. 2 (PNPV project). The learning model and the serious game...

Serious games are designed to train and educate learners, opening up new learning approaches like exploratory learning and situated cognition. Despite growing interest in these games, their design is still an artisan process. On the basis of experience in designing computer simulation, this paper proposes an agent-based approach to guide the design...

Serious games are designed to train and educate learners, opening up new learning approaches like exploratory learning and situated cognition. Despite growing interest in these games, their design is still an artisan process. On the basis of experiences in designing computer simulation, this paper proposes an agent-based approach to guide the desi...

Training and simulation games are a type of serious game that allow learners to deal with realistic scenarios, to test their behavior under controlled conditions and to increase their understanding of the simulated system/process. In these games, the educational goal changes the issues related to the simulation design. In particular, achieving righ...

In questo articolo si propone una riflessione critica sull'uso delle tecnologie mobili per l'apprendimento, il cosiddetto mobile learning. A partire da una lunga esperienza sul campo, si analizza un progetto di mobile learning, il progetto MoULe (Mobile and Ubiquitous Learning), dalla fase di progettazione alla sua concreta sperimentazione in conte...

Natural language sentences can be represented as vectors in a high dimensional vector space. Generally, these models are based on bag of words approaches, and therefore they do not fully capture the semantics of sentences which depends both by the semantics of the words, and their order in in the phrase. In this work we propose a sub-symbolic metho...

The focus of this chapter is on “key issues for fostering OER communities of practice with teachers.” It is based on the successful experiences of three European funded projects: SLOOP, TENEGEN, and SLOOP2DESC. These three projects draw on the concept of open education as well as on the open and free software movements. The original idea behind the...

In questo articolo vengono presentati alcuni dei risultati del progetto MOTILL. MOTILL, ovvero “Le Tecnologie Mobili nell’apprendimento permanente: buone pratiche”, è un progetto finanziato dalla Comunità Europea, nell’ambito del National Lifelong Learning Strategies (NLLS). Il progetto, durato un anno terminato a Marzo 2010, si è focalizzato sull’...

p>Web 2.0 applications and the increasingly use of social networks have been creating new informal learning opportunities. Students interact and collaborate using new learning environments which are structurally different from traditional e-learning environments. In these informal unstructured learning contexts the boundaries between the learning c...

In: IHEPI 2010 - From higher education to innovation. Management and entrepreneurship in a changing market (Budapest, 6-8 september 2010). Proceedings, pp. 447 - 454. A. Klucznik-Toro, K. Bodis, I. Kis Pl (eds.). Publikon PublisherslIDResearch Ltd, 2010.

In: ICVL 2010 - 5th International Conference On Virtual Learning. Models & methodologies, technologies, software solutions. Phase II-Period 2010-2020: e-Skills for the 21st Century (Targu Mures, Romania, 29-31 October 2010). Proceedings, pp. 226 - 230. M. Pogonariu (ed.). Bucharest University Press, 2010.

In: IHEPI - From higher education to innovation. Management and entrepreneurship in a changing market (Budapest, 6-8 september 2010). Proceedings, pp. 143 - 151. A. Klucznik-Toro, K. Bodis, I. Kis Pl (eds.). Publikon PublisherslIDResearch Ltd, 2010.

In: MELLearN - 6th Hungarian National and International Lifelong Learning Conference University of Pecs (Pecs, 29-30 april 2010). Proceedings, pp. 428 - 435. Bényei, Jozsefné (eds.). REXPO Kft, 2010.

In: TD-Tecnologie Didattiche, vol. 49 (2) pp. 62 - 64. Metacognizione e ambienti per l'apprendimento. CNR-Istituto per le Tecnologie Didattcihe (ed.). Edizioni Menabò, 2010.

In this paper we illustrate a dynamic approach in the use of the metadata and

The informal learning opportunities created by the Web 2.0 applications and the increasingly use of social networks, allow users to interact and collaborate in new ways. Students use new learning environments which are structurally different from traditional e-learning environments, in which the boundaries between the learning contexts and social s...

In: ICVL 2009 - The 4th International Conference on Virtual Learning : VIRTUAL LEARNING - VIRTUAL REALITY (Bucarest, 30 October-1 November 2009 (IASI, 30 October-1 November 2009). Proceedings, pp. 257 - 264. University of Bucharest and Gh. Asachi Technical University of Iasi, 2009.

In: ICL2009 - International Conference ICL 2009 : The challenges of life long learning (Villach, Austria, 23-25 September 2009). Proceedings, pp. 665 - 674. Auer, Michael E (eds.). International Association of Online Engineering, 2009.

In: ICVL 2009 - The 4th International Conference on Virtual Learning (Iasi, 30 October-1 November 2009). Proceedings, pp. 348 - 356. University of Bucharest and Gh. Asachi Technical University of Iasi, 2009.