For the thirty-seventh year, the Research and Theory Division and the Division of Instructional Design of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) sponsored the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the annual AECT Convention in Jacksonville, Florida. This year's Proceedings…

Videogames challenge our notions of identity, creativity, and moral value, and provide a powerful new avenue for teaching and learning. This book is a rich and provocative guide to the role of interactive media in cultural learning. It searches for specific ways to interpret videogames in the context of human experience and in the field of…

The growing interest in the use of games and simulations to support learning is evidenced in the literature, as well as in recent research projects and initiatives. While a focus upon the users of games and simulations is not well evidenced in the literature, this study aimed to highlight key issues and perceptions that inform and underpin how…

The emergence of human communication systems is typically investigated via 2 approaches with complementary strengths and weaknesses: naturalistic studies and computer simulations. This study was conducted with a method that combines these approaches. Pairs of participants played video games requiring communication. Members of a pair were…

An eight-year-old boy, Adrian, draws subject matter and formats for his writing from a new, digital medium: the video game. (Contains 2 tables and 5 figures.)

In the 20th century, student work was dominated by paper-print assignments, particularly essays. This was a reflection of the dominant media technology of that century--books, magazines, newspapers, radio, and television. But those days are gone. In the 21st century, the dominant media technology of today's students is the Internet. In addition to…

This paper describes ToonTalk, a general-purpose concurrent programming system in which the source code is animated and the programming environment is a video game. The design objectives of ToonTalk were to create a self-teaching programming system for children that was also a very powerful and flexible programming tool. A keyboard can be used for…

Will video games change the way we learn? We argue here for a particular view of games--and of learning--as activities that are most powerful when they are personally meaningful, experiential, social, and epistemological all at the same time. From this perspective, we describe an approach to the design of learning environments that builds on the…

The acceptance of animation technologies is increasing. Video games, such as Sony PlayStation (SONY, 2002), have become part of the culture for young people from kindergarten through undergraduate school. Animation technologies have been implemented into educational systems in the form of animated pedagogical agents (Johnson, 2000). The research…

Interactive immersive entertainment, or videogame playing, has emerged as a major entertainment and educational medium. As research and development initiatives proliferate, educational researchers might benefit by developing more grounded theories about them. This article argues for framing game play as a "designed experience." Players'…

Distance education has been an important research issue of multimedia computing and communication. Since the instructional activities are implemented on cyberspace, how to control behaviors of students and to increase the degree of communication awareness have been a challenging issue. We propose a system based on the scaffolding theory. Behaviors…

Games and Simulations in Online Learning: Research and Development Frameworks examines the potential of games and simulations in online learning, and how the future could look as developers learn to use the emerging capabilities of the Semantic Web. It presents a general understanding of how the Semantic Web will impact education and how games and…

As often as language teachers lecture about the importance of continual practice to adolescent learners, the dullness of homework exercises designed primarily to be educational has difficulty competing with popular media designed solely to be entertaining. Recently, numerous attempts have been made to develop "edutainment" titles that seek to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to propose and demonstrate an evidence-based scenario design framework for assessment-based computer games. Design/methodology/approach: The evidence-based scenario design framework is presented and demonstrated by using BELLA, a new assessment-based gaming environment aimed at supporting student learning of…

A growing number of studies have investigated diverse applications of technology-based interventions with children with autism. The purpose of this paper is to review the growing empirical support for the efficacy of technology-based interventions with children with autism and to recommend future directions for research. This review will focus on…