Abstract:During the last few years, there has been a growing interest in students getting engaged in digital game-making activities so as to enhance their thinking skills. The findings of studies that have examined the impact of such initiatives are quite positive, especially concerning the promotion of 21st century skills; however, many students seem to face difficulties in getting a deeper understanding of the game development life cycle. Additionally, students often have difficulties in meaningfully reusing and applying the concepts from various subjects, mainly mathematics and physics, into their game-making tasks or in understanding advanced programming commands while creating their games. The present study presents an innovative game-making teaching approach that suggests a series of steps for the systematic design and rapid development of motion-based touchless games, i.e., games that are based on natural user interaction technologies, like the Microsoft Kinect camera. Findings from evaluation studies in two (2) secondary schools indicate that this approach can increase student motivation, strengthen their computational thinking, enhance their understanding of geometric principles and improve their social skills.

The assessment of students' performance in e-learning environments is a challenging and demanding task for the teachers. Focusing on this challenge, a new assessment tool, called Learning Analytics Enriched Rubric (LAe-R) is presented in this paper. LAe-R is based on the concept of assessment rubrics which is a very popular assessment technique in education. LAe-R contains "enriched" criteria and grading levels that are associated to data extracted from the analysis of learners' interaction and learning behavior in an e-learning environment. LAe-R has been developed as a plug-in for the Moodle learning management system. Via an example, we will show how LAe-R can be used by teachers and students.

Nowadays, teachers in school practice design and apply complex interactive learning scenarios according to standardised collaborative learning strategies such as jigsaw, TPS, etc. There is a well justified and an immediate need to help teachers to easily assess student's performance. The assessment process in such complex educational scenarios is not a trivial issue since teachers have to combine data gathered during student's individual performance along with the data which has been gathered throughout group collaboration-activities. Effective means of facilitating the assessment task is the use of rubrics as well as the interaction analysis indicators. This paper has proposed the idea of enriching the traditional assessment rubrics with indicators that measure the students' performance in computer supported synchronous or asynchronous collaborative activities. Thus in this paper we propose a new conceptual assessment framework based on how an enriched assessment rubrics can be built. We will show an example of enriched assessment rubrics via a complex interactive learning scenario about the controversial issue of human cloning which the teacher can evaluate efficiently (1) the autonomous and team group performance of students (2) the spectrum of students' interactions in each phase of the scenario and as a whole. Comments about the usability of this new type of rubrics will be reported as well as ideas for future research plans.

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