In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has shown significant progress and its potential is growing. An application area of AI is Natural Language Processing (NLP). Voice assistants incorporate AI by using cloud computing and can communicate with the users in natural language. Voice assistants are easy to use and thus there are millions of devices that incorporates them in households nowadays. Most common devices with voice assistants are smart speakers and they have just started to be used in schools and universities. The purpose of this paper is to study how voice assistants and smart speakers are used in everyday life and whether there is potential in order for them to be used for educational purposes.

The cultural heritage sector increasingly integrates augmented and virtual reality (VR) solutions to meet dissemination and interpretation needs for its collections. As research in the field grows, the required entertainment and learning impacts of such applications are rising. This study presents a VR museum that aims to facilitate an understanding of cultural heritage. More specifically, an exhibition was designed, curated and developed in a VR environment based on a framework that encourages the public’s interaction with the artworks and experiential learning through activities that utilize VR functionalities in a meaningful way. This framework was applied in a contemporary art museum where the description of artistic concepts is not always obvious to the general public due to the abstract forms of the artworks or the particularities of different artistic movements. This paper focuses on the application development and three user experience evaluations (museum experts, technical experts and general audience). The results were positive regarding the perceived sense of control, usability and the feelings of the user, including their sense of entertainment. Additionally, the participants valued the educational value of the developed activity types and their usefulness. Moreover, the users were interested in exploring the cultural heritage content available in the exhibition, and they would suggest the application to colleagues or friends.

Educational games have attracted the interest of instructors and researchers in various fields of knowledge since they seem to motivate students, engage them in the educational process, and improve their performance. Computer programming is, without a doubt, cognitively demanding, and this has resulted in extended utilization of educational games. An important limitation of the relevant research lies in the fact that it is based on volunteer participants, while it is carried out as a side activity in programming courses and not in real-world course settings. In this article, a study investigating the utilization of the educational game SQL Island in the context of an assignment on the Structured Query Language (SQL) in a compulsory undergraduate course on Web programming is presented. Fifty-six students attending the course evaluated the player experience and perceived short-term learning through a questionnaire based on the MEEGA+ model for evaluating educational games targeted to computing education. The results both on player experience and perceived short-term learning were rather positive. Students’ performance in the programming tasks of the game was very good, and the overall intervention proved to be effective. Moreover, conclusions were drawn on the constituent features of educational games that can be effectively used in the context of programming assignments.

This paper reports students’ perceptions and experiences attending an object-oriented programming course in which they developed software using the Distributed Pair Programming (DPP) technique. Pair programming (PP) is typically performed on one computer, involving two programmers working collaboratively on the same code or algorithm. DPP on the other hand is performed remotely allowing programmers to collaborate from separate locations. PP started in the software industry as a powerful way to train programmers and to improve software quality. Research has shown that PP (and DPP) is also a successful approach to teach programming in academic programming courses. The main focus of PP and DPP research was PP’s effectiveness with respect to student performance and code quality, the investigation of best team formation strategies and studies of students’ attitudes. There are still limited studies concerning relationships between performance, attitudes and other critical factors. We have selected some of the most common factors which can be found in the literature: academic performance, programming experience, student confidence, feelgood factor, partner compatibility and implementation time. The main goal of this study was to investigate correlations between these attributes, while DPP was used as the main programming technique.