The emergence of new technologies such as three-dimensional virtual worlds brings new opportunities for teaching and learning. We conducted an action research approach to the analysis of how teaching and learning of computer programming at the university level could be developed within the Second Life virtual world. Results support the notion that it is possible to use this environment for better effectiveness in the learning of programming. The main results are the identification of problems hampering the teacher's intervention in this virtual world and the detection of solutions for those problems that were found effective to the success in using this environment for teaching/learning computer programming.

This paper presents an approach that enables the staging of choreographies for education and training purposes in multiple virtual world platforms. Choreography is the description of a set of actions that must or may be executed by a group of participants, including the goals to be achieved and any restrictions that may exist. For capturing and representing multi-actor multidomain choreographies an approach based on ontologies with distinct levels of abstraction is adopted. Further, this paper proposes a modelling driven approach and a set of processes that, through mappings between ontologies, enable the automatic construction of a platform-specific choreography from a platformindependent one, thus reducing the time and effort of the choreography development. For this, the MDA paradigm was adopted and adapted in a way where models can reflect two dimensions of independence: platform independence and application domain independence. We also point the guidelines for staging the choreography in a virtual world platform.

Gestural interaction devices emerged and originated various studies on multimodal human-computer interaction to improve user experience. However, there is a knowledge gap regarding the use of these devices to enhance learning.We present an exploratory study which analysed the user experience with a multimodal immersive videogame prototype, based on a Portuguese historical/cultural episode. Evaluation tests took place in high school environments and public videogaming events. Two users would be present simultaneously in the same virtual reality environment: one as the helmsman aboard Vasco da Gama's XV-century Portuguese ship, another as the mythical Adamastor stone giant at the Cape of Good Hope. The helmsman player wore a virtual reality headset to explore the environment, whereas the giant player used body motion to control the giant, and observed results on a screen, with no headset. This allowed a preliminary characterization of user experience, identifying challenges and potential use of these devices in multi-user virtual learning contexts. We also discuss the combined use of such devices, towards future development of similar systems, and its implications on learning improvement through multimodal human-computer interaction.