Session Chair:

3D Worlds for Education: Cooperation and Virtual Presence
Nicoletta Di Blas, Evelyne Gobbo, Paolo Paolini, Caterina Poggi
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
HOC Laboratory Milano, Italy

New technologies offer extraordinary possibilities for innovative teaching/learning activities, provided we carefully investigate how to effectively integrate them into curricula and traditional classroom workflows. This paper deals with the case of cooperative 3D environments, that is, virtual places in which users connect in real time and access the 3D worlds , being represented by Avatars (graphic representation of the users themselves). Users, in our case, are students who are inserted in an overall complex learning workflow, which include sessions with 3D worlds, use of forums, traditional studying, homework, group work, etc. The paper is based on the authors experience with 3 such environments, all aimed at schools, that have involved so far more than 3,000 students from Europe and Israel. Requirements, design issues, and educational effectiveness focusing upon cooperation features, virtual presence and its evaluation will be discussed, with the supporting evidence of data collected along the experimentation.

An Approach of Penmanship Education System by Using Horizon View Camera ~SHUJI,Japanese Educational Culture~
Nobuyasu Okabe, Kunihito Kato, and Kazuhiko Yamamoto
Yamamoto Lab, Dept. of Information Science, Faculty of Engineering, Gifu Univ., Japan

In this research, we paid attention to penmanship that is a Japanese culture. In the current penmanship education, teachers evaluate the written character by students, and he/she teaches based on that result. Therefore, we consider an education support system by writing process, in addition to the education from the character written the current. In the education from the character that had been actually written, a lot of time is needed to improve theirs skill. If the teacher and the student know the movement of the brush from the writing character, the penmanship education will be easier. Therefore, the movement of the brush is detected and evaluated that process, that information supports the education. Only in taking an image of the brush by using a general camera setting, it is difficult to separate the character written by the black ink and the black brush. Therefore, we used "Horizon View Camera" (: HVC) that is a special camera setting, and it can be easy to separate the brush and the character.

On Crossing Knowledge and Understanding Boundaries between Subject Fields when Developing e-Learning with Video Games
*John N Sutherland, **Thomas Connolly
*University of Abertay Dundee, Scotland
**University of Paisley, Scotland

Creating e-learning simulations using video games is a relatively straightforward task as a simple learning tool for such as learning words, numbers and imagery. However, learning higher-level skills requires a game more clearly embedded within the realities of the real world. This raises issues of how the mores of the real-world affect what can and perhaps should be developed with a video game simulation. The developer needs to be more keenly aware of her need to be knowledgeable on both the field within which the simulation is embedded and the wider field of education. This is a rich cross-mixture of technology, anthropology, sociology, pedagogy, politics and philosophy that should be as fully understood as possible to ensure the video game simulation is both appropriate and correctly functional.

Music Lessons for Alice: A Plan for Teaching Introductory Programming Using Sound
Frances L. Van Scoy, Alex Eisenhart and Meagan Hubbell
West Virginia Virtual Environments Laboratory,
Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering,
West Virginia University, USA

This paper describes the preliminary design for a software package for teaching introductory programming using sound instead of visualization. It was inspired by Alice, initially developed at the University of Virginia and greatly expanded at Carnegie Mellon University. The primary intended users of the proposed package are visually impaired middle school students.