Sofia Papavlasopoulou

• PhD
• Associate Professor at Norwegian University of Science and Technology

This paper presents insights from five case studies with 173 students aged 11–14 years old across three countries in Europe, exploring the integration of design thinking (DT) and emerging digital technologies in K-12 education. The study aimed to understand the impact of DT and digital technologies on the development of students’ 21st-century skill...

Inquiry-based science learning is an educational strategy to enable students to actively engage in science learning concepts through inquiry activities such as experiments and observations. Gamification demonstrates a promising potential to engage children in learning contexts. In this regard, this paper presents Experiverse as an exemplar along wi...

Background Digital solutions have been reported to provide positive psychological and social outcomes to childhood critical illness survivors, a group with an increased risk for long-term adverse psychosocial effects. Objective To explore health professionals’ perspectives on the potential of digital psychosocial follow-up for childhood critical i...

Design thinking (DT) and computational activities foster children’s knowledge capital for 21st-century literacies. The analysis of these activities often overlooks affective and behavioural states despite their significance in providing insights into children’s learning processes. Typically, these states and their changes are self-reported, lacking...

Nowadays, learning activities have become more interactive and collaborative than ever before. However, it remains unclear what makes the group perform differently in such a learning context. With the empowerment of multimodal data (MMD), we conducted a field study involving 12 groups of children who collaborated during two-day-long classroom activ...

Environmental education plays a critical role in addressing current environmental challenges. However, it is challenging to effectively engage and motivate students to learn more and have a critical view about it. Therefore to enhance students learning experience in environmental education, this paper presents the development of a gamified app name...

This paper presents a systematic literature review that aims to portray an overview of pedagogical strategies that Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) teachers adopt to support children’s play with coding toys. In addition, the article synthesizes findings about teachers’ views in relation to the use of coding toys in ECEC and describes th...

The use of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and 3D printing are amongst the EU targeted actions for supporting the digital transformation of education. Yet, despite these technologies being accessible to education stakeholders, there is a lack of concrete pedagogy and teachers’ professional development for t...

Responsible AI (RAI) is an emerging topic in the Information Systems (IS) literature. RAI entails ensuring ethical, transparent, and accountable use of AI technologies in line with societal values, expectations, and norms. The challenge for research on IS education at university level is to accompany the growing research on RAI with approaches to e...

Background: The aim of this systematic literature review is to explore a selection of existing digital solutions for psychosocial follow-up for children who survived a critical illness with research questions based on the Population, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcome (PICO) model. Methods: A five-stage iterative process for systematic literatu...

The use of sensors to support learning research and practice is not new, whether in the context of wearable technology, context-aware technology, ubiquitous systems or else. Nevertheless, the proliferation of sensing technology has driven the field of learning technology in the development of tools and methods that can generate and leverage sensor-...

Educational research has used the information extracted from facial expressions to explain learning performance in various educational settings like collaborative learning. Leveraging this, we extracted the emotions based upon two different theoretical frameworks from videos with children aged 13–16 while collaborating to create games using Scratch...

Despite the increasing demand for non-formal science learning activities, few studies report on practitioners' perspectives and experiences with designing and implementing such activities worldwide. This paper focuses on their challenges by drawing upon twenty-two interviews with practitioners involved in diverse science learning activities in vari...

Purpose Governments and organizations worldwide are concerned over the declining number of young people choosing to study Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), especially after the age of 16. Research has foregrounded that students with positive attitudes toward science are more likely to find it relevant and aspire to a science...

Gaze interaction has become an affordable option in the development of innovative interaction methods for user input. Gaze holds great promise as an input modality, offering increased immersion and opportunities for combined interactions (e.g., gaze and mouse, touch). However, the use of gaze as an input modality to support children’s gameplay has...

Identifying and supporting children’s play and problem solving behaviour is important for designing educational technologies. This can inform feedback mechanisms to scaffold learning (provide hints or progress information), and assist facilitators (teachers, parents) in supporting children. Traditionally, researchers manually code video to dissect...

This paper investigates the relation between children’s joint gaze and emotions with the information flow of the screen from a causal point of view, in the context of collaborative coding. We employ Granger’s definition of causality to extend the knowledge we have about children’s collaborative activities from correlational methods. We organised a...

Digital games have gained significance as a new paradigm in education. Digital games are accessible and affordable to anyone and provide opportunities for at-scale teaching and learning. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in digital games to support computational thinking and programming in pre-college (K–12) schools. Artificial In...

Making has received growing interest in formal and informal learning environments. However, there is an acute need to investigate and get a deep understanding of the characteristics of making-based coding activities for children and how to appropriately design them. Over 3 years, we conducted empirical studies to investigate children’s learning exp...

Multi-Modal Data (MMD) can help educational games researchers understand the synergistic relationship between player's movement and their learning experiences, and consequently uncover insights that may lead to improved design of movement-based game technologies for learning. Predicting player performance fosters opportunities to cultivate heighten...

Social Networking Sites (SNSs) play an important role in our daily lives and the number of their users increases regularly. To understand how users can be satisfied in the complex digital environment of SNSs, this study examines how motivations and emotions combine with each other to explain high satisfaction. Users’ motivations comprise four attri...

There is a growing number of informal and non-formal learning activities worldwide related to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) curricular subject areas—particularly those involving coding and making. To better understand the general aim and content of such activities, we conducted a survey addressing highly experienced instructi...

Motion-Based Touchless Games (MBTG) are being investigated as a promising interaction paradigm in children’s learning experiences. Within these games, children’s digital persona (i.e, avatar), enables them to efficiently communicate their motion-based interactivity. However, the role of children’s Avatar Self-Representation (ASR) in educational MBT...

Learning activities for/with children include rich interactions with peers, tutors, and learning materials (in digital or physical form). During such activities, children gain new knowledge and master their skills. Automatized and continuous monitoring of children's learning is a complex task, but, if efficient, can greatly enrich teaching and lear...

The assessment of learning during class activities mostly relies on standardized questionnaires to evaluate the efficacy of the learning design elements. However, standardized questionnaires pose additional strain on students, do not provide “temporal” information during the learning experience, require considerable effort and language competence,...

Over the last few years, the integration of coding activities for children in K-12 education has flourished. In addition, novel technological tools and programming environments have offered new opportunities and increased the need to design effective learning experiences. This paper presents a design-based research (DBR) approach conducted over two...

We present a collaborative learning study contextualized within Project based Learning. The main aim of our contribution is to use the physiological data such as heart rate, skin temperature, electrodermal activity and blood volume pressure to quantify the learning experiences of the collaborating teams. We propose an automatic method to extract co...

This paper employs facial features to recognize emotions during a coding activity with 50 children. Extracting group-level emotional states via facial features, allows us to understand how emotions of a group affect collaboration. To do so, we captured joint emotional state using videos and collaborative experience using questionnaires, from collab...

There is a growing number of informal and non-formal learning activities worldwide related to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) subject areas – particularly, those related to coding and making. To understand the general aim and content of such activities, we conducted a survey addressing highly experienced instructional designers...

Collaboration and engagement while coding are vital elements for children, yet very little is known about how children's engagement and collaboration impact their attitudes toward coding activities. The goal of the study is to investigate how collaboration and engagement moderate children's attitudes about coding activities. To do so, we designed a...

Computational thinking and coding are becoming an integral part of K-12 education, with female students being underrepresented in such subjects. The proliferation of technological tools and programming environments offers the opportunity for creative coding activities for children and increases the need for appropriate instructional practices. In t...

We present a study in the context of coding activities for children. Our main focus is towards understanding the relation between children's attitudes towards coding and their behaviour while coding. Forty-four school children participated in this study solving different coding problems. We used mixed methods to capture attitude and behaviour of th...

Computational thinking and coding for children are attracting increasing attention. There are several efforts around the globe to implement coding frameworks for children, and there is a need to develop an empirical knowledge base of methods and tools. One major problem for integrating study results into a common body of knowledge is the relatively...

This study aims to explain how motivations and emotions combine to influence users’ satisfaction with social media. Motivations are decomposed into four attributes, entertainment, information, social-psychological, and convenience, while emotions are divided into their two main categories, that is positive and negative emotions. In order to examine...

Children spend numerous hours on the Internet daily. While online, they meet a great number of opportunities as well as risks. Of these risks, cyber bullying and privacy violations are of major concern, in addition to exploitation and child pornography. Our hypothesis is that the solution is not to keep children and teens away from the Internet, bu...

Programming-based making activities are at the core of teaching strategies to engage young students in learning programming for developing computational thinking skills. Despite the initial evidences of enthusiastic participation in such activities, more systematic studies are needed to better understand drivers of students' intentions to participa...

The Make2Learn workshop aims to explore the introduction in the learning processes of tools and methods for creative and joyful ideation, design and prototyping of Internet of Things (IoT) artifacts. Making IoT artefacts enable children to foster co-creativity and joy in learning processes and to construct knowledge; leading to STEM concepts. Makin...

Computational thinking and coding is gradually becoming an important part of K-12 education. Most parents, policy makers, teachers, and industrial stakeholders want their children to attain computational thinking and coding competences, since learning how to code is emerging as an important skill for the 21st century. Currently, educators are lever...

This research examines the combined effect of positive and negative emotions on online shopping behaviour when customers use personalised services. Data from 421 customers, experiences with personalised online shopping, were used to empirically validate the effect of the level of emotions of different valence and intensity on their intention to pur...

The Maker Movement has gathered much attention recently, and has been one of the fastest-growing topics, due to contemporary technical and infrastructural developments. The maker culture can be described as a philosophy in which individuals or groups of individuals create artifacts that are recreated and assembled using software and/or physical obj...

With the proliferation of programming languages for children (i.e., Scratch, Alice, Kodu) combined with programmable hardware (i.e., Arduino, 3D printers, robots); efforts to provide evidence based best practices for introducing and engaging children in programming is urgently needed. In this work-in-progress we present the early results of an empi...

It is well known in the computer science education community that is important to encourage students to acquire programming skills and become creators and not only mere consumers. Different students have different needs and learning styles when introduced to programming and making activities, however it is challenging to accommodate all these needs...

In this art demonstration we will present the art installations which are at the center of a creative development program for young students with the name KODELØYPA. KODELØYPA is based on the philosophy of creative reuse of recycled materials and the open-source software Scratch and Arduino. KODELØYPA is based on an empirically validated framework,...

This study examines the combined effect of positive and negative emotions on user satisfaction with social network services (SNSs). The sample consists of 582 individuals who use SNSs. Our results suggest that as the intensity of positive emotions increases, users are more satisfied with SNSs. This applies to low and medium levels of negative emoti...