Of the rapidly growing amount of digital educational material, very little bridges the gap between experimental learning environments and computer-based learning environments. In this paper, a concept that bridges this gap is presented. The concept is based on observations in the subject of home economics in Danish primary and lower secondary school. The work is based on the theory of flow, storyline and computer games. The concept is exemplified by a prototype of a MOO storyline. The prototype proposes a way to integrate the technology in a way that makes use of children's natural curiosity and motivation for game playing combined with the joy of working with food and thus is a step on the road to producing a learning resource in an area that until now has been dominated by electronic recipe managers and digital health-tracking managers. Read more...

Exploration of virtual environments may be accomplished with different interface metaphors. Previous research suggests that vestibular and proprioceptive information provided by immersive interfaces facilitates spatial orientation on simple path-integration tasks. We examine whether these interface variables impact performance across paths of variable complexity. Our immersive interface provided all users the ability to conduct the search component of our task more efficiently. Our results, however, show that the immersive interface was no more effective than our nonimmersive one for maintaining orientation. In fact, the immersive interface had a negative impact on performance (absolute error) for individuals who had extensive experience with playing video games. When measured in terms of consistency of response, our results suggest that having extensive game-play experience will negatively impact orientation performance with both interfaces. We speculate that this is due to the conflicting nature of the skills that avid game players acquire in game-play versus those required to perform in our task. Read more...

A group of 97 participants who were monolingual or bilingual and who had extensive practice playing computer video games or not completed two Simon tasks. The tasks were presented in two conditions that manipulated the number of response switches required in each block of trials. Bilingualism and video-game experience each influenced a different aspect of performance: Video-game players were faster in most conditions, including control conditions that did not include conflict from irrelevant position; bilinguals were faster only in a condition that required the most controlled attention to resolve conflict from the position and the stimulus. The results show the potential of experience to modify performance and point to Subtle processing differences in various versions of the Simon task. Read more...