Cristina Rebollo

Coding camps bring together individuals from diverse backgrounds to tackle given challenges within a limited timeframe. Such camps create a rich learning environment for various skills, some of which are directly associated with the camp, and some of which are a result of working as a team during the camp. Unfortunately, coding camps often remain isolated from the broader educational curriculum or other bigger context, which downplays the opportunities they can offer to students. In this paper, we present the vision of the European initiative OSCAR, which aims at connecting coding camps to the educational and professional context faced by the learners. In addition, we sketch a supporting platform and its features for connected coding camps.

Vegetation plays a major role in the realistic display of outdoor scenes. However, manual plant placement can be tedious. For this reason this paper presents a new proposal in the field of procedural modeling of natural scenes. This method creates plant ecosystems that maximizes the covered space by optimizing an objective function subject to a series of constraints defined by a system of inequalities. This system includes the constraints of the environment taking into account characteristics of the terrain and the plant species involved. Once the inequality system has been defined, a solution will be obtained that tries to maximize the radius of the projected area of the trees and therefore the extension of the vegetation cover on the ground. The technique eliminates the trees that do not achieve a minimum growth radius, simulating the typical competitive process of nature. Results show the good performance and the high visual quality of the ecosystems obtained by the proposed technique. The use of this kind of optimization techniques could be used to solve other procedural modeling problems in other fields of application.

Any citizen can be involved in a situation that requires basic first aid knowledge. For this reason, it is important to be trained in this kind of activity. Serious games have been presented as a good option to integrate entertainment into the coaching process. This work presents a video game for mobile platforms which facilitate the formation and training in the PWA (Protect, Warn, Aid) first aid protocol. Users have to overcome a series of challenges to bring theoretical concepts closer to practice. To easily change the point of view of the game play, Augmented Reality technology has been used. In order to make each game looks different, neural networks have been implemented to perform the behavior of the Non-Playable Characters autonomous. Finally, in order to evaluate the quality and playability of the application, as well as the motivation and learning of content, several experiments were carried out with a sample of 50 people aged between 18 and 26. The obtained results confirm the playability and attractiveness of the video game, the increase of interest in learning first aid, as well as the greater fixation of the different concepts dealt with in the video game. The results support that this application facilitates and improves the learning of first aid protocols, making it more enjoyable, attractive, and practical.

Master lectures of history are usually quite boring for the students, and to keep their attention requires a great effort from teachers. Virtual and Augmented Reality have a clear potential in education and can solve this problem. Serious games that use immersive technologies allow students to visit and interact with environments dated in different ages. Taking this in mind, this article presents a playful virtual reality experience set in Ancient Rome that allows the user to learn concepts from that age. The virtual experience reproduces as accurately as possible the different buildings and civil constructions of the time, making it possible for the player to create Roman cities in a simple way. Once built, the user can visit them, accessing the buildings and being able to interact with the objects and characters that appear. Moreover, in order to learn more information about every building, users can visualize them using Augmented Reality using marker-based techniques. Different information has been included related to every building, such as their main uses, characteristics, or even some images that represent them. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the developed experience, several experiments have been carried out, taking as sample Secondary School students. Initially, the game’s quality and playability has been evaluated and, subsequently, the motivation of the virtual learning experience in history. The results obtained support on the one hand its gameplay and attractiveness, and on the other, the student’s increased interest in studying history, as well as the greater fixation of different concepts treated in a playful experience.

The traditional method for learning the multiplication tables is a repetitive and boring task. Teachers try to find new methods to motivate children in this tedious duty, and one of the lines to consider is to integrate en- tertainment into educational processes. This work presents a new multimedia interaction approach in order to allow children to practice these math opera- tions and have fun. The learning process has been gamified by means of two mini-games designed for mobile platforms, based on meromictic or repetitive learning. The genre of these mini-games have been selected according to chil- dren preferences: one turn-based fighting and other throwing-objects game. A series of proposed multiplications have to be solved during the play to per- form the player actions. Moreover, in order to support learning engagement, both have been visualized through Augmented Reality, combining real and virtual reality. This paper discusses the good results of mixing entertainment with some learning tasks, due to the engagement of the children to the mobile based games. A pilot study has been performed in order to evaluate the learn- ing effectiveness and usability of the proposal. Results support that playing the video games makes this tedious multiplication practice more enjoyable and attractive for children so they improve their math skills.

Plants and trees are an essential part of outdoor scenes. They are represented by such a vast number of polygons that performing real-time visualization is still a problem in spite of the advantages of the hardware. Some methods have appeared to solve this drawback based on point- or image-based rendering. However, geometry representation is required in some interactive applications. This work presents a simplification method that deals with the geometry of the foliage, reducing the number of primitives that represent these objects and making their interactive visualization possible. It is based on an image-based simplification that establishes an order of leaf pruning and reduces the complexity of the canopies of trees and plants. The proposed simplification method is viewpoint-driven and uses the mutual information in order to choose the leaf to prune. Moreover, this simplification method avoids the pruned appearance of the tree that is usually produced when a foliage representation is formed by a reduced number of leaves. The error introduced every time a leaf is pruned is compensated for if the size of the nearest leaf is altered to preserve the leafy appearance of the foliage. Results demonstrate the good quality and time performance of the presented work.