A Framework for Designing Interactive Digital Learning Environments for Young People

Little attention has been given to the psychological and sociological value of play despite its many advantages to guiding the design of interactive multimedia learning environments for children and adults. This paper provides a brief overview of the history, research, and theory related to play. Research from education, psychology, and anthropology suggests that play is a powerful mediator for learning throughout a person's life. The time has come to couple the ever increasing processing capabilities of computers with the advantages of play. The design of hybrid interactive learning environments is suggested based on the constructivist concept of a microworld and supported with elements of both games and simulations.

Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) from United Nations refers to the inclusion and quality of education. This implies providing equal access to all levels of education. While a lot of focus has been on inclusion and accessibility through universal design with a focus on disabilities, the aim of this workshop was to explore the role of inclusion for learners of all ages, shifting from a strong disability-oriented focus. We targeted in this workshop discussions around the design and use of Digital Learning Environments (DLE) with equal access and rights to participate. DLE are tools employed in educational institutions (from schools to higher education) for teaching and learning purposes, but also in workplaces, edutainment, and e-commerce. The participants had the chance to present different viewpoints on inclusion in education through issues, methods and stories obtained from design experiences and/or from empirical studies on use of DLE.

There is a worldwide concern for young children’s online safety and a growing necessity for e-safety skills to be taught to children from a young age as part of formal schooling. The purpose of this study was to design and evaluate the effectiveness and motivational capacity of an interactive web-based learning environment for improving children’s e-safety skills. A quasi-experimental pre-test post-test control group design was used with an experimental group of 48 sixth-grade primary school students, who used the web-based learning environment over two 80-min lessons, and a control group of 25 students who did not. Findings revealed a statistically significant difference (t(47) = −14.06, p < 0.01) in the experimental group students’ e-safety performance, when students’ pre-test scores (mean (Μ) = 41.13, SD = 10.47) were compared to their post-test scores (Μ = 56.69, SD = 9.38). The analysis of an attitudes questionnaire and of student interviews documented the experimental group students’ positive attitudes toward the learning environment. Findings provide evidence of the effectiveness and motivational capacity of the web-based learning environment, which can be used in either formal education or informal learning settings, for improving children’s e-safety skills.

Etkilesimli ogrenme ortamlari, cok yonlu ogretim ve etkilesim olanaklarina sahip, ogrencilerin ogrenmelerini yonlendirebildigi, zaman ve mekandan bagimsiz ortamlaridir. Etkilesimli ogretim ortamlarinin niteligini olumlu yonde etkileyen etmenler arasinda ogrencilerin algilama duzeylerine uygunlugu ve tasarimin ogrenci uzerinde olusturdugu algisal etki yer almaktadir. Bu nedenle etkilesimli ogretim ortamlarinin tasarlanmasinda kimi gorsel algi kuramlarinin ise kosulmasi onem tasimaktadir. Bu baglamda arastirmada, algilama surecinde tasarimin gelistirilmesine dogrudan etki edebilecek algi kuramlarindan Gestalt Gorsel Algi Kurami, Olasilikli Ogreti Kurami, Bilisimsel Algi Kurami, Noropsikolojik Algi Kurami, Yapilandirmaci Gorsel Algi Kurami ve Dogrudan Algi Kurami etkilesimli ortam tasarimina yansimalari baglaminda incelenmis ve bu yansimalara dayali bir etkilesimli ogretim ortami tasarlanmistir. Etkilesimli ogretim ortami, ortaokul ikinci sinif ogrencilerinin 'Isik ve Ses' unitesini ogrenmelerine yardimci olmasi amaciyla tasarlanmistir. Nitel arastirma yonteminin kullanildigi arastirmada etkilesimli ogretim ortamini kullanan ogrencilerin gorusleri alinmistir. Ogrenciler gorsel algi kuramlarina dayali olarak gelistirilen etkilesimli ogretim ortamini faydali ve guduleyici bulmuslardir.

Students’ difficulties in learning of mathematics have for a long time, been investigated by researchers in different fields. Within educational research there are claims that technological tools appropriately integrated in students’ mathematical work can support their understanding of a wide range of concepts in mathematics. This paper reports on the initial investigation for the design of Interactive Learning Environments (ILE) to support students’ learning of mathematics. The project is guided by the notion of Design Based Research (DBR) and aims to explore how to design ILE that support students’ understanding of integrals in particular. The initial study was conducted at a Swedish university with 10 students in 4 groups. The study confirmed difficulties in students’ understanding of integrals as reported in educational literature and provides a set of design aims for the next iteration of the ILE to support the learning.

Teaching Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in higher education faces the challenge of engaging students accustomed to interactive and digital learning environments. Although gamification has emerged as a promising pedagogical strategy to enhance motivation, participation, and learning, there is still no consensus on which gamification elements and strategies should be prioritized in ICT courses. To address this gap, this study aimed to identify, through expert consensus, the most relevant gamification components for ICT teaching in higher education. A modified Delphi study with a mixed-methods design was conducted in two rounds: an open exploratory phase and a structured round using a five-point Likert scale. Twelve experts were selected based on a competence coefficient (K ≥ 0.75). Quantitative analyses included means, standard deviations, interquartile range (IQR), coefficient of variation (CV), and Kendall’s coefficient of concordance (W), complemented by qualitative thematic coding with an inter-coder reliability of κ = 0.82. Consensus thresholds followed current Delphi standards (≥ 80% agreement, IQR ≤ 1, CV ≤ 0.30, and W ≥ 0.60). The results indicate that experts prioritized challenges and quests (83% agreement; W = 0.66), followed by points and rewards (67%) and the complementary use of badges and leaderboards. Strong consensus was reached regarding the potential of gamification to strengthen problem-solving, critical thinking, and collaboration (100%; W = 0.90), and to increase active participation (100%) and promote deep understanding (83%). However, heterogeneity persisted in relation to the selection of technological platforms (W = 0.27) and specific strategies (W = 0.28), and the effects on academic performance were reported as inconsistent. Overall, the findings suggest that gamification is most effective when systematically integrated into ICT curricula, supported by teacher training and immediate feedback mechanisms. As no universal technological platform is recommended, the use of contextual selection criteria is essential. These results provide a conceptually validated reference framework for the design of gamified learning experiences in higher education and underscore the need for further empirical validation across diverse educational contexts.

Groundwater represents more than 97% of the globally available freshwater resources. Groundwater is situated in geological structures in the subsurface and is therefore not visible, and difficult to characterize and manage. As a consequence, it is often not adequately considered by authorities, the general public – and in education. However, teaching and learning Hydrogeology and Groundwater Management at universities, as well as continuing education training for professionals, is essential to deal with future challenges. For this reason, it is important to use suitable educational materials to improve understanding of the complex topic of groundwater among these target groups. An ongoing Erasmus+ cooperation project named iNUX – interactive understanding of groundwater hydrogeology aims to address the need for digital teaching material (www.gw-inux.org). The iNUX project aims to achieve an interactive and digital learning environment in hydrogeology and groundwater management with a European but also global target of teachers and students.Existing experience in teaching relevant groundwater subjects from highly reputable European universities is used to develop provide open source interactive and digital teaching material focusing on fundamental and applied hydrogeology. The teaching material covers basic theory in combination with field and laboratory applications in different European environments (Northern Europe, Central Europe, and the Mediterranean). The teaching material comprises (1) various types of videos (e.g., field experiments, lab experiments, screencasts of calculations and software use), (2) interactive educational documents based on Python  like Streamlit Apps and  Jupyter notebooks that combine explanation with live code, (3) various types of questions and problems that allow different assessments to enhance self-controlled learning of students. All materials are intended as open source and publicly available. The iNUX activities also comprise initiatives to establish interest groups to combine efforts towards larger pools of commonly developed digital teaching material (e.g., open source repositories like https://github.com/gw-inux/, question pools, and more) and to link with other activities like the 'Groundwater project' (https://gw-project.org/). The presentation will include existing examples of digital teaching materials and initial evaluation results to investigate the effect on student learning.

In this paper an agent-based approach to interactive learning environments (ILE) is proposed. It is argued that current interactive learning systems, especially the intelligent tutoring systems, do not satisfy the minimal requirements of an ILE. A specification is given of an agent-based approach to ILE in which situated agents are associated with different aspects of the teacher's behaviour. It is argued that the interaction between these teacher agents and the student agent results in a highly adaptive and interactive learning system that satisfies the requirements of an ILE.The most promising is perhaps that the behaviour of the teacher seems already fairly complex even with a very limited amount of simple behaviours of the agents.

This study is concerned with establishing a means to generate better methods to analyse and learn about task design for digital learning environments. Specifically, we utilise data consisting of over 2 million unique answers from a popular Danish digital learning environment, matematikfessor.dk, to solve 892 unique tasks dealing with linear equations. Utilising the Multinomial Infinite Relational Model (MIRM), which can account for extensive didactical coding of the five most popular answers to each of the 892 tasks, we successfully co-clustered students and tasks into groups for further analysis. The results showed that the analysis of these clusters of tasks can provide access to valuable information on the difficulties students in four respective groups face and what kind of specific tasks and knowledge pertinent to what types of tasks actually affect students’ problems or difficulties anticipated by the task designer.

Designing, developing, and evaluating interactive and adaptive learning environments requires significant investment of financial and human resources. This is especially the case when evaluating the impact of learning environments aimed at supporting self-directed longer-term learners, environments of increasing interest to AIED as the field moves into lifelong learning where mentorship is key. In this paper we propose the use of simulation to help in both the design and evaluation of such environments. As a case study, we have built a simulated university doctoral program (SimDoc) with simulated doctoral students and supervisors (mentors). To make sure SimDoc replicates observed data from a real-world environment as closely as possible, we informed and calibrated the simulation model with data from an actual doctoral program, as well as drawing on various empirical studies of graduate students and supervisors. Next, we used the calibrated simulation model to explore the effect of varying research group sizes of learners and supervisors’ mentoring workload on students’ completion rates and time-to-completion. Our main goal is to provide insight into how to build simulations of environments that support self-directed longer-term learners through a case study of one such simulation, thus further demonstrating the importance of simulation in AIED.

The Interactive Learning Environment is designed to combine the traditional resources of a textbook with the hands design experiences that are vital to a real understanding of basic engineering principles. The ILE builds on the technology developed for the World Wide Web to provide a learning environment that can be easily accessed from any browser. In addition to browseable text, JAVA-based CAD tools can be accessed through interactive figures embedded in the text where students can investigate circuit behavior under the guidance of focused tutorials.

Learning by problem-posing is a promising way to learn arithmetic and mathematics. In this paper, we report the design and development of an interactive learning environment for problem-posing as sentence-integration in arithmetic word problems. In this research, we have paid a special attention to “reverse thinking” problems. To find the characteristics of the reverse thinking problems, we built a task model of problem-posing and design the learning environment based on the model. This leaning environment has been already developed and experimentally used in a class of fourth grade at an elementary school.

behaviour, in particular how manipulations of some aspect of the system will effect its behaviour. In order to teach these behavioural characteristics, quantitative simulations of these systems are often used in computer-based learning environments. However, some behavioural fea~ tures are hard to communicate by a computer program that is based on such a quantitative simulation. Among others, generating causal explanations of the systems' behaviour, reasoning from structure (e.g., deriving the behaviour of a given structural description), and qualitativeness in general (e.g. a vocabulary for reasoning about behaviour in qualitative terms) cannot be dealt with adequately. A large part of the research on qualitative reasoning originated from efforts trying to cope with the limitations that followed from using quantitative simulators for teaching purposes. This talk will first discuss the idea of interactive learning environments. In particular, it will focus on the idea of learning by interacting with a simulation model. Next, the talk will present ideas on how qualitative models can be used for this purpose. During the past 10 years a large number of promising results have been achieved by the qualitative reasoning community, whereas at the same time the limitations of the current techniques are well understood. The talk will particularly focus on the use of causal models for curriculum planning, cognitive diagnosis and explanation. Finally, the use of digital multimedia technology provides opportunities to broaden the scope of communication between learner and computer. As such multimedia related issues are important for the construction of interactive articulated learning environments. Interesting is the notion of knowledge-based multimedia: automated generation and adaptation of a certain medium and its contents by a computer program in order to optimise the interaction with a learner or a trainee. The idea of automatic visualisation of qualitative models will be discussed.

Learning environments are ubiquitous. Schools, universities, workplaces, professional organizations, community groups, families, religious groups, museums, after‐school programs, and peer groups are environments that provide opportunities for learning and socialization. As digital technologies saturate our lives and participation in online environments soars, both the number and the variety of digital learning environments are growing exponentially. Video games, social networking sites, open courses, and a variety of social and networked technologies provide individuals with opportunities to learn content and competencies, and adopt new behavior patterns. Growing numbers of learners are taking courses online (Allen and Seaman 2013) and governments, elected officials, and interest groups are encouraging the development of digital learning opportunities (e.g., European Commission 2013). Digital learning environments are central to endeavors to design, develop, and deliver digital learning opportunities. While the LMS (e.g., Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Moodle, Instructure Canvas) is often used in such initiatives, a number of other digital learning environments have been adopted (e.g., blogging platforms, social media, and other standalone digital environments). We note that the terms LMS and VLE refer to the same technology. The term LMS is used in this chapter. The notion of the learning environment is associated with the constructivist movement (Wilson 1995, 27), as emphasis has moved from the individual (e.g., student, instructor), to the context, to the place and space surrounding learning and instruction. Wilson argues: “learning environments seem intrinsically fuzzy and ill‐defined. That is, an environment that is good for learning cannot be fully prepackaged and defined. If students are involved in choosing learning activities and controlling pace and direction, a level of uncertainty and uncontrolledness comes into play.” The increasing use of digital technologies in education gave rise to the notion of the digital learning environment. Yet, digital learning environments are also ill‐defined. Digital Learning Environments

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is one of the most important spectroscopy methods in modern chemistry, yet students need help learning and understanding its complex nature. Empirical investigations show that simulation and (interactive) visualizations can support students by offering new possibilities for investigating connections and direct effects of parameter changes. Therefore, this article introduces a digital and interactive learning environment that addresses students’ learning difficulties to facilitate the understanding of crucial 1H NMR background knowledge. The SpinDrops Learning Environment (SDLE) covers practically useful, basic concepts for interpreting a 1H NMR spectrum from a theoretical point of view. It includes new interactive visualizations and a dynamic and realistically simulated ppm-spectrum. To evaluate the role and influence of interactivity by parameter control regarding students’ learning processes and conceptual understanding, we designed two SDLE versions differing in the degree of interactivity and dynamics. We then asked N = 50 students to work with the learning environment in a pre-post study with questionnaires on affective constructs and a 1H NMR knowledge test on conceptual understanding. N = 12 students additionally took part in a think-aloud study. The results showed that students benefit from learning with the SDLE as their conceptual understanding and NMR-related interest, self-efficacy, and estimated knowledge increase significantly. Although the SDLE showed significantly positive effects on students’ learning results and processes, the difference in the degree of interactivity and dynamics inside the software only had a small impact, as revealed in the quantitative and qualitative data.