Overview

Recent years have seen a rapid proliferation of serious games as they provide the context in which participants can dunk and experience a simulated environment as real, as they can achieve rich and complex content-based interaction. Serious games including simulations and immersive environments, have the potential to be an important teaching tool because they involve learners in interactive, engaging and immersive activities that allow them to practice and improve technical, practical and creative skills. To achieve this serious games use advanced interfaces close to game quality, creativity, and advanced technology to meet training objectives, but these principles alone will not guarantee that the intended learning occurs. To be an effective educational tool, serious games must couple advanced technological interventions with sound cognitive, learning, and pedagogical principles into their design and structure.

This special session aims to explore how cognitive principles can be applied to improve the training effectiveness in serious games. Papers that explore the design and development of serious games that automatically process and manage effectively the content and context in which learning takes place to support formal and informal learning both for teacher’s training and student’s learning would be of special research interest. Therefore, we invite practitioners and researchers alike to submit papers under the following topics.

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List of Topics

-Serious games[1] in training and education
-Natural Language and serious games (with focus in training and education)
-Al in serious games for training/education
-Context aware (e.g., location, user performance, preferences, state of the game, other) serious games
-Cognitive and pedagogical principles / issues / aspects of serious games
-Empathy and serious games / educational games
-User centred serious game design
-Serious game analytics
-New developments and trends in context aware serious games in training and education
-Gamified education/training applications

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Author Info

All accepted full papers will be published in Springer’s C​CIS conference proceedings series.​

The submitted papers must not exceed 4-6 pages (short paper) or 10-12 pages (full paper). Contributions are welcome on work-in-progress, research results, technical development, and best practices. Research, development, and best practices contributions will be accepted according to their quality and relevance either as full or short papers. Work-in-progress will only be accepted as short papers.

Submitted papers must follow the same guidelines as the main conference submissions. Please visit http://immersivelrn.org/ilrn2016/author-info/ for guidelines and templates.

For submitting a paper to this special track, please use the submission system https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ilrn2016 , log in with an account or register, and select the track “Special Track 4: Cognitive Serious Gaming (CSG)” to add your submission.


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Special Track Chairs

Markos Mentzelopoulos, University of Westminster, UK
Daphne Economou, University of Westminster, UK
Vassiliki Bouki, University of Westminster, UK
Aristidis Protopsaltis, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Germany
Ioannis Doumanis, CTVC Ltd, UK

Program Committee (to be confirmed)

Mark Baldwin, University of Westminster, UK
Tom Boyle, London Metropolitan University, UK
Paul Brna, University of Edinburgh, UK
Vassiliki Bouki, University of Westminster, UK
Ioannis Doumanis, CTVC Ltd, UK
Daphne Economou, University of Westminster, UK
Charalampos Karagiannidis, University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece
Petros Lameras, Serious Games Institute, UK
Catherine Loveday, University of Westminster, UK
Panagiotis Petridis, Aston University, UK
Aristidis Protopsaltis, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Germany
Daniela Romano, University of Sheffield, UK
Thrasyvoulos Tsiatsos, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

[1] We refer to an ecosystem of platform and devices (desktop, mobile, iTV) that support serious games and also 2D or 3D environments.