Game technology has been widely used for educational applications, however, despite the common use of background music in games, its effect on learning has been largely unexplored. This paper discusses how music played in the background of a computer-animated history lesson affected participants' memory for facts. A virtual history lesson was…

Animated pedagogical agents with characteristics such as facial expressions, gestures, and human emotions, under an interactive user interface are attractive to students and have high potential to promote students' learning. This study proposes a convenient method to add an embodied empathic avatar into a computer-aided learning program; learners…

Program animation systems have not been as widely adopted by computer science educators as we might expect from the firm belief that they can help in enhancing computer science education. One of the most notable obstacles to their adoption is the considerable effort that the production of program animations represents for the instructor. We…

Humans draw on their stereotypic beliefs to make assumptions about others. Even though prior research has shown that individuals respond socially to media, there is little evidence with regards to learners stereotyping and categorizing pedagogical agents. This study investigated whether learners stereotype a pedagogical agent as being…

The SAGRES system is an educational environment built on the Web that facilitates the organization of visits to museums, presenting museum information bases in a way adapted to the user's characteristics (capacities and preferences). The system determines the group of links appropriate to the user(s) and shows them in a resultant HTML page. In…

"Bohr's Atomic Model" is a small interactive multimedia program that introduces the viewer to a simplified model of the atom. This interactive simulation lets students build an atom using an atomic construction set. The underlying design methodology for "Bohr's Atomic Model" is model-centered instruction, which means the central model of the…

This paper describes two empirical studies which investigated the importance for spatial learning of view control and object manipulation within 3D environments. A 3D virtual chemistry laboratory was used as the research instrument. Subjects, who were university undergraduate students (34 in the first study and 80 in the second study), undertook…