Active school transport (AST) refers to using active means of transport such as walking, cycling, or riding a non-motorised scooter to school. It can help improve adolescents’ physical activity levels and create a more sustainable environment. The study involved 70 adolescents (45 boys and 25 girls) aged 13 to 14 from one school in Skellefteå, in Northern Sweden. In an online questionnaire, they were asked about their perceptions of cycling, walking, and riding a non-motorised scooter to school. This study used descriptive statistics, multiple regression analysis, and hypothesis testing with ANOVA to analyse the collected data and compare the perceptions of different types of transport on safety, environmental, and personal factors among adolescents in Northern Sweden. According to the results, more adolescents walked to school than cycled, and significantly few rode a non-motorised scooter to school. Most adolescents believe walking or cycling to school is a great way to exercise. Furthermore, the study also revealed that many adolescents avoid using AST due to the time it takes. Although the study showed that adolescents felt sufficient support for using AST from schools and parents, the number of adolescents using motorised transport is higher during winter than in summer. Additionally, most of them were more confident about cycling and walking to school than riding a non-motorised scooter and thought using AST was nice. Finally, most adolescents perceived having complete control over their transport options when going to school. The research indicates that it is crucial to implement interventions that inspire children to be interested and excited about using AST. These strategies should include fostering an AST culture that is fun and positive, as well as creating environments that are safe and supportive. The research results will guide the creation of a persuasive game that can motivate adolescents to use AST and measure its effectiveness.

ecent studies have shown that children are not adequately physically active and there is a need to increase children’s physical activity. This study describes new opportunities and solutions for using existing games and gamification to increase physical activity among children in Sweden. We adopted the principles of Tic-Tac-Training to redesign, build, and test a classical multiplayer cooperative game, Battleship, to create a PA game that children experience as fun and engaging. The low fidelity prototype of the game was developed using an iterative game development life cycle and tested with 13 young male children aged 8–11 in a real-world informal setting. A mixed-method research approach was used to understand the users’ experiences and the impact of the Battleship-PA game on behavior change regarding physical activity. Research data were collected through audio recordings of interactions, direct observation, and a user experience questionnaire. The results of this study indicate both positive and negative feedback that can be used to improve the game and user experiences. The results from the unfiltered recordings revealed that both teams were competitive, cooperated within their team, and became excited whenever they destroyed opponent’s ships or were close to winning. However, the children felt bored and exhausted when many gamification tasks were repeated several times in a game session. Direct observation indicated that the children enjoyed the physical activities resulting from playing the game. However, participants who had not previously played the classical version of Battleship were confused about the objectives and concept of the game. The analysis of the user experience questionnaire indicated that most children found the game easy to play, motivating, engaging, interactive, fun, cooperative, competitive, and visually appealing. Furthermore, most children agreed that the game helped them to be physically active and strongly agreed that they enjoyed performing the physical activities in the game. Future work is needed to improve the game user interface, gamification elements, and prepare additional physical activity tasks for a rewarding experience.

Understanding the principles of computational thinking (CT), e.g., problem abstraction, decomposition, and recursion, is vital for computer science (CS) students. Unfortunately, these concepts can be difficult for novice students to understand. One way students can develop CT skills is to involve them in the design of an application to teach CT. This study focuses on co-designing mini games to support teaching and learning CT principles and concepts in an online environment. Online co-design (OCD) of mini games enhances students’ understanding of problem-solving through a rigorous process of designing contextual educational games to aid their own learning. Given the current COVID-19 pandemic, where face-to-face co-designing between researchers and stakeholders could be difficult, OCD is a suitable option. CS students in a Nigerian higher education institution were recruited to co-design mini games with researchers. Mixed research methods comprising qualitative and quantitative strategies were employed in this study. Findings show that the participants gained relevant knowledge, for example, how to (i) create game scenarios and game elements related to CT, (ii) connect contextual storyline to mini games, (iii) collaborate in a group to create contextual low-fidelity mini game prototypes, and (iv) peer review each other’s mini game concepts. In addition, students were motivated toward designing educational mini games in their future studies. This study also demonstrates how to conduct OCD with students, presents lesson learned, and provides recommendations based on the authors’ experience.

Virtual Reality provides the ability to immerse users in realistic environments, which enables utilization of the technology as an immersive educational tool. This is particularly useful for educational fields that require students to visit certain locations, or that concern hazardous situations and materials. The EIT Raw Materials Project MiReBooks intends to develop novel augmented and virtual reality teaching tools to mining education. Within the project, we developed an interactive multi-user VR environment, named MiReBooks VR, for teaching mining to students by simulating a VR mine and creating learning scenarios in it. In this paper, we briefly described MiReBooks VR, and then focused on determining the capacity of the server running in a head-mounted display by measuring latency. To assess the system's capacity to handle multiple students connected to a class session, client simulation tests of up to 30 simultaneous connections were conducted. The results suggests performance issues with respect to latency affecting all peers that could cause a negative effect to the VR user experience. In addition, the results indicate that the frame rate requirements for VR applications are difficult to maintain in multi-user environments using current off-the-shelf VR equipment. Based on the development experiences and the tests, we provide five lessons learned that can be of interest to software engineers and researchers working on the development of multi-user VR systems.

Technology developments have expanded the diversity of interaction modalities that can be used by an agent (either a human or machine) to interact with a computer system. This expansion has created the need for more natural and user-friendly interfaces in order to achieve effective user experience and usability. More than one modality can be provided to an agent for interaction with a system to accomplish this goal, which is referred to as a multimodal interaction (MI) system. The Internet of Things (IoT) and augmented reality (AR) are popular technologies that allow interaction systems to combine the real-world context of the agent and immersive AR content. However, although MI systems have been extensively studied, there are only several studies that reviewed MI systems that used IoT and AR. Therefore, this paper presents an in-depth review of studies that proposed various MI systems utilizing IoT and AR. A total of 23 studies were identified and analyzed through a rigorous systematic literature review protocol. The results of our analysis of MI system architectures, the relationship between system components, input/output interaction modalities, and open research challenges are presented and discussed to summarize the findings and identify future research and development avenues for researchers and MI developers.

Digital games have traditionally been targeted at younger generations, although the proportion of older adult players is increasing. However, the design processes of digital games often do not consider the special needs of older adults. Co-design is a potential method to address this, but there is little research on co-designing games with older adults. In our study, we proposed a co-design process model that considers the intergenerational perspective. Using this model, eight older adults (two males and six females aged 47–80) and 22 sixth graders (11 males and 11 females aged 12–13) co-designed a digital game. The content of the game was based on old concepts used by the designers during their childhood. Similarly, game content involving new words and concepts were produced by the sixth graders. We collected data using semi-structured interviews and observations during the co-design process over a period of 24 months and then processed the data using grounded theory. The results indicated that the older adults identified seven game elements as essential to make games fun—appearance and aesthetics, competition, manageability of gameplay, social impact, familiarity, unpredictability, and intergenerational gameplay. Furthermore, we identified six assets that older adults have as game co-designers and five challenges that co-designing games with older adults may entail.

Recent decline in active transport and increase in motorised transport decreases physical activity and increases air pollution. Using games to motivate people to change their behaviour towards active transport can mitigate this. We proposed Tic-Tac-Training, a distributed, collaborative and competitive game for promoting active transport at workplaces. Tic-Tac-Training was developed through a multidisciplinary and iterative user-centred design (UCD) process in four stages: (i) paper prototype, (ii) low-fidelity prototypes, (iii) high-fidelity prototypes, (iv) digital prototype. User testing and playtesting (N=12) yielded a number of improvement suggestions. We also analysed how Tic-Tac-Training supports the eight core drives of gamification (Octalysis), and presented 17 lessons learned in four categories. Findings suggest that UCD can be useful for developing exergame interventions for workplaces. Moreover, the lessons learned can benefit exergame designers. More research is needed to measure the behaviour change effect of Tic-Tac-Training and its applicability to other use cases.

Effective educational interventions require sufficient learner engagement, which can be difficult to achieve if the learner is inadequately motivated. Games have been shown to possess powerful motivators that fuel a person's desire to engage in unattractive activities, such as learning theoretical material. However, to design an educational game that is capable of providing motivated engagement is a challenging task. Previous research has proposed various game motivators and game design principles to alleviate this, but a comprehensive synthesis has yet to appear. In this article, we conducted a systematic literature review that yielded two major contributions: 1) a taxonomy of 56 game motivators in 14 classes; and 2) a taxonomy of 54 educational game design principles in 13 classes, with linkages to the identified game motivators. As a minor contribution, we have also presented a classification of gamification-related terms and proposed different strategies for applying gamification. The results of this article are available for educational game designers and researchers to use as a practical toolkit for the creation and evaluation of motivating educational games that keep players engaged. Moreover, this article is the first step toward the creation of a unified gamification framework.

Location-based games (LBGs) are typically played outdoors, as moving in the game is done by moving in the real world. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, people were advised and even forced by governments to stay home and avoid social contact to slow down the spreading of the virus. The major LBG developers reacted by making in-game adjustments that allow playing from home, while still maintaining some incentives for players to go outdoors and socialise. For investigating factors influencing intention to play LBGs socially during the on-going pandemic, we collected cross-sectional survey data (N = 855) from Finnish players of the most popular LBG, Pokémon GO. The results showed that perceived severity of the pandemic and a positive attitude towards both governmental measures and in-game changes for combatting COVID-19 predicted intention to reduce social playing. Fear of missing out and deficient self-regulation increased playing intensity, which in turn negatively correlated with the intention to reduce social playing. Our findings demonstrate the influence that LBGs can have on human behaviour even during global crises such as COVID-19. As such, LBGs can be considered a resource in designing interventions for influencing movement at a population level.

The number of available educational games has enormously grown and it is difficult for users to identify which games are pedagogically effective among the multitude of options in app marketplaces. Recent studies on math games have highlighted the importance of (1) linking learning attributes and gameplay and (2) game design that supports students' deliberate practise. Using these as a measure for pedagogical quality, we investigated 109 math games found on Google Play Store (n=61) and iOS App Store (n=48). Furthermore, monetization solutions, data use permissions, target age group and type of mathematical content were retrieved from the apps. The analysis showed that only 11,0% of the games integrated learning attributes with gameplay and 12,0% of the games contained tasks which support learners' deliberate practice. The most commonly featured math subject was arithmetic and the games were targeted mostly to early childhood (6–12 years). Finally, games following curricula content and recommended design principles were difficult to locate using the search tools of the app marketplaces.