Although many scholars recognise the great potential of games for teaching and learning, the EU-based industry for such “serious games” is highly fragmented and its growth figures remain well behind those of the leisure game market. Serious gaming has been designated as a priority area by the European Commission in its Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. The RAGE project, which is funded as part of the Horizon 2020 Programme, is a technology-driven research and innovation project that will make available a series of self-contained gaming software modules that support game studios in the development of serious games. As game studios are a critical factor in the uptake of serious games, the RAGE projects will base its work on their views and needs as to achieve maximum impact. This paper presents the results of a survey among European game studios about their development related needs and expectations. The survey is aimed at identifying a baseline reference for successfully supporting game studios with advanced ICTs for serious games.

Technology transfer of gamification assets to non-leisure contexts such as the energy efficiency sector has become the “holy grail” of today's research and industrial efforts towards a more sustainable energy system. In the liberalized retail market context, electric utilities are gradually adopting new business models towards transitioning their conventional energy supply business to a more service-oriented model. This paper presents the H2020-funded SOCIALENERGY project, which develops a gaming and social network platform for educating energy consumers and virtual energy communities towards evolving EU energy markets' operation. The proposed S/W platform is modular by design and facilitates the easy, rich and deep communication among involved stakeholders from individual energy consumers and virtual energy communities, to utilities, policy makers, and even other indirect stakeholders (such as electric appliance retailers and building renovators) that will allow them to: i) discover each other, ii) educate themselves in order understand the difficulties and challenges that each one faces, and iii) finally interact and trade among. A serious game for energy efficiency, advanced research algorithms and data analytics as well as a novel competence-based education framework complement the SOCIALENERGY project's innovations.

In this paper we present a study, aimed to identify the main challenges teachers face when trying to implement innovative teaching methods, stressing on identifying the needed STEM teachers competence development. The overall design of the study follows the European Awareness Scenario Workshop methodology and aims to negotiate the teachers’ need, policy makers decisions and other stakeholders’ understanding of the resent National regulatory framework, related to the teachers’ competence development. The main research activities, performed during the study, are outlined and compared with similar research efforts and initiatives. At the end systematic analysis of results achieved is performed and proposals for further improvement of the competence development of teachers were made. The extracted requirements – mode, forms, topics, etc., for STEM teachers’ competence development are valuable for universities and other institutions offering teachers’ professional development courses. They