Papers by Alysson Diniz dos Santos
Leveraging a collaborative augmented reality serious game to promote sustainability awareness, commitment and adaptive problem-management
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Tecnologia da Informação e Comunicação: pesquisas em inovações tecnológicas - Volume 2
Anais do Workshop de Computação Aplicada em Governo Eletrônico (WCGE 2021), 2021
In the context of Human Computer Interaction, engagement might be seen as a reflection of users&#... more In the context of Human Computer Interaction, engagement might be seen as a reflection of users' involvement and interaction with a digital system. To digital government initiatives, civic engagement refers to the ways in which citizens participate in the life of a community, in order to improve conditions for others or to help shape the communitys future. Recent studies have approached civic engagement harnessed by gamification, i.e. the adoption of game elements in non-game contexts. In this context, the goal of this research is to investigate which gamification studies and features have been applied to civic engagement initiatives. This study reviews current literature, looking for the relationship between civic engagement and how it has been applied to the Human Computer Interaction context.
The recent advent of smart meters to increase the effectiveness of urban Water Demand Management ... more The recent advent of smart meters to increase the effectiveness of urban Water Demand Management Strategies (WDM) has allowed water utilities to gather quasi real-time consumption data to monitor the network status and load and useful to develop models of consumers' behavior. At the same time, the consumption information can warn users about their habits in a fine-grained way. In principle, the feedback alone could stimulate increased awareness on water usage, but the motivations and individual attitudes of consumers are mostly hidden. Moreover, the same sustainable behavior should be incentivized also for households in which smart metering solutions are not present, but for which data gathering becomes a challenge. Modifying users' behavior by means of software is a tough task, due to the difficulty in designing an effective application able to maintain the behavioral changes in the long term. Gamification, the use of game design techniques and game mechanics to enhance tra...
Investigating the Design and Evaluation of Educational Games Under the Perspective of Player Experience
Educational games are praised for their potential in providing engaging and self motivating learn... more Educational games are praised for their potential in providing engaging and self motivating learning experiences. However, in order to fully leverage those capabilities, game designers have to carefully balance factors that provide an enjoyable experience, without losing the focus on the instructional aspect. This work examines the design and evaluation of educational games focusing on the perspective of individual player emotions and experience. This investigation targets the following research questions: how to include (and balance) both the educational and the player experience elements into the game design? Which specific methodologies are available to evaluate player experience in educational games? After discussing possible answers to these questions, we briefly sketch directions that demand further research.
Player experience in educational games design and evaluation
Anais do XXXI Simpósio Brasileiro de Informática na Educação (SBIE 2020), 2020
Considering the relevance of Computational Thinking (CT) and the need to develop this competence ... more Considering the relevance of Computational Thinking (CT) and the need to develop this competence in Computer Science (CS) students.This paper presents and evaluates a CT course, given remotely, to students in the first semester of the CS. The course aimed to learn CT using Computational Action. The applications were designed using Design Thinking and developed on the block programming platform, App Inventor. The results indicate that after the course the students showed a visible increase in knowledge about the CT and in the motivation to learn more about the subject.
Anais do Workshop sobre Interação e Pesquisa de Usuários no Desenvolvimento de Jogos (WIPlay), 2019
Jogos sérios oferecem potencialidades interessantes para informar as pessoas sobre temas sociais ... more Jogos sérios oferecem potencialidades interessantes para informar as pessoas sobre temas sociais emergentes. Por exemplo, eles oferecem interatividade através da jogabilidade, um recurso distintivo, que pode envolver ativamente o jogador. Nesse contexto, o foco deste estudo é detalhar a concepção, desenvolvimento e avaliação preliminar do jogo "A Batalha de Ma´Sohora". O jogo pretende oferecer uma experiência de jogo que provoque reflexões sobre o chauvinismo masculino e está planejado para ser estendido para incluir outros temas relevantes.
IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, 2019
Finding proper ways to address learning about sustainability is a relevant issue. Sustainability ... more Finding proper ways to address learning about sustainability is a relevant issue. Sustainability learning has to face some inherent complexities, due to two main factors: a) the interdisciplinary domains related to sustainability issues, such as ecology, economics, politics and culture, and b) the involvement of several social structures, such as individuals, families and communities. One recent research proposal is to exploit serious games to foster learning in this area. This resulted in a significant increase in the number of approaches discussed in the literature over the last few years. Notwithstanding this growing scenario, sustainability serious games still lack a reasoned evaluation, in order to clarify their possible applications and to define effective design strategies to approach them. To this end, in this paper we investigate the current state of the art of serious games for sustainability, identifying and discussing the most common applications. The research process included both scientific publications and unpublished materials. References were searched according to guiding questions, which helped focus the extraction of information, and through recursive browsing of their citations. Based on the research results, we propose a taxonomy for sustainability serious games and a classification of reviewed works according to this taxonomy. We also analyze design strategies, drawn from the literature, expressly conceived for the development of effective sustainability serious games. Finally, we discuss the current challenges and present possible areas of research in this field.
The Design of an Augmented Reality Collaborative Game for Sustainable Development
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2016
In spite of recent efforts, there is still a demand for tools facilitating sustainability instruc... more In spite of recent efforts, there is still a demand for tools facilitating sustainability instruction. To this end, serious games offer remarkable possibilities to foster learning in this area. However, evidences suggest that these potentialities have not been fully leveraged yet. In particular, it is challenging to design games representing the different domains (ecology, economics, politics, and culture) and social structures (individuals, families and communities) involved by sustainability issues. This work explores the mix of augmented reality, collaborative gaming and theoretical guidelines in the design of Sustain, an educational game focused on raising awareness on sustainability topics. The paper details Sustain design decisions, highlighting their relation with the chosen methodology. Our aims are: (i) to exemplify the use of a not yet adopted theoretical background, and (ii) to present reflections concerning its use.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2016
Methodological frameworks guide the design of digital learning game based on well founded learnin... more Methodological frameworks guide the design of digital learning game based on well founded learning theories and instructional strategies. This study presents a comparison of five methodological frameworks for digital learning game design, highlighting their similarities and differences. The objective is to support the choice of an adequate framework, aiming to promote them as a way to foster principled digital learning games design. This paper concludes that: (i) interactivity, engagement and increasing complexity of challenges are fundamental factors to digital learning game design; (ii) the pedagogical base, the target, the possibility of doing game assessment and the presence of practical guidelines are the selection criteria that influence most the choice of a methodological framework, and (iii) the development of digital learning games-preferably by different research teams-is needed to provide empirical evidence of the utility of framework-based design.
Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience, 2015
Cloud Computing is not only a pool of resources and services offered through the internet, but al... more Cloud Computing is not only a pool of resources and services offered through the internet, but also a technology solution that allows optimization of resources use, costs minimization and energy consumption reduction. Enterprises moving towards cloud technologies have to choose between public cloud services, such as: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Cloud and Google Cloud services, or private self built clouds. While the firsts are offered with affordable fees, the others provide more privacy and control. In this context, many open source softwares approach the buiding of private, public or hybrid clouds depending on the users need and on the available capabilities. To choose among the different open source solutions, an analysis is necessary in order to select the most suitable according with the enterprise's goals and requirements. In this paper, we present a depth study and comparison of five open source frameworks that are gaining more attention recently and growing fast: CloudStack, OpenStack, Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and Nimbus. We present their architectures and discuss different properties, features, useful information and our own insights on these frameworks.
2014 16th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing, 2014
Cloud computing is continuously growing as a prominent technology for enterprises. While several ... more Cloud computing is continuously growing as a prominent technology for enterprises. While several giant public cloud providers, such as Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google are competing to extend their market, there is still a large number of organizations asking higher level of privacy and control over cloud solutions. Therefore, the need to have private cloud solutions is obvious. To overcome this need there are several ongoing open source software frameworks for building public and private clouds. Among them, OpenStack and CloudStack are growing at fast pace and gaining more attention. An analysis on these software stacks is necessary in order to choose the most suitable solution that matches an enterprise's requirements. This paper main contribution is an in depth study and comparison of the cloud properties of these two open source frameworks, providing useful information on open source cloud solutions that are not available elsewhere.
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Papers by Alysson Diniz dos Santos