The popularity of VR technology has led to the development of public VR setups in entertainment venues, museums, and exhibitions. Interactive VR CAVEs can create compelling gaming experiences for both players and the spectators, with a strong sense of presence and emotional engagement. This paper presents the design and development processes of a VR interactive environment called MobiCave (in room-scale size), that uses motion-tracking systems for an immersive experience. A user study was conducted in the MobiCave, aimed to gather feedback regarding their experience with a demo game. The study researched factors such as immersion, presence, flow, perceived usability, and motivation regarding players and the bystanders. Results showed promising findings for both fun and learning purposes while the experience was found highly immersive. This study suggests that interactive VR setups for public usage could be a motivating opportunity for creating new forms of social interaction and collaboration in gaming.

The objective of this chapter is to explore the evolution and opportunities of the emerging field of digital games for programming learning, the challenges and tensions that they present, and how educators may be able to collectively advance this work to benefit student learning. This work summarizes previous empirical evidence concerning the positive impacts and outcomes of digital games in computing education, or even impacts that do not let games to spread. Hence, a systematic literature review is carried out in this context to provide a comprehensive overview of works carried out towards incorporating digital games in order to acquire CT skills or learn basic programming concepts within P12 education. The chapter discusses on the range of indicators and measures used in the 44 selected studies, together with methodological limitations and recommendations for further work in this area.

Digital assistants—such as chatbots—facilitate the interaction between persons and machines and are increasingly used in web pages of enterprises and organizations. This paper presents a methodology for the creation of chatbots that offer access to museum information. The paper introduces an information model that is offered through the chatbot, which subsequently maps the museum’s modeled information to structures of DialogFlow, Google’s chatbot engine. Means for automating the chatbot generation process are also presented. The evaluation of the methodology is illustrated through the application of a real case, wherein we developed a chatbot for the Archaeological Museum of Tripolis, Greece.

The remedial teaching policy is a flagship education policy of the Greek Ministry of Education that aims to create a school of equal opportunities by providing additional support to students from disadvantaged social backgrounds. In this work we utilised a data set provided by the Ministry of Education, followed a black box approach and built on previous results in order to achieve the first ever evaluation, based on data, of the remedial teaching policy. Our findings indicate that remedial teaching is very effective in supporting very weak students, helping 70% of them achieve better academic performance and one out of three of them to sustain this enhanced academic performance in the future, long after they have stopped receiving remedial teaching. On the other hand, and contrary to what is widely believed, our results show that remedial teaching has the opposite impact to what it was designed for, as it is primarily the privileged students that receive the benefits. Consequently, in the way it is currently implemented, remedial teaching widens the gap between privileged and disadvantaged students rather than reduces it. The implications of the work are wide and far reaching, including the establishment of the need to revisit the way remedial teaching is implemented, the highlighting of the value in the data gathered by the Ministry of Education and the proof that individual educational policies can be objectively assessed despite being part of a complex system in which multiple education policies are implemented concurrently.