This paper presents an educational Ambient Intelligent (AmI) environment, named AmI Playfield. AmI Playfield is grounded on contemporary learning principles to build a natural playground enriched by computational vision techniques, which provides the basis for physical (kinesthetic) collaborative play and performance measurement. Visual displays, mobile controllers and sound facilities support the player strategy, while their customizations allow the easy development of a wide variety of learning applications. This paper: (i) discusses the design, implementation and evaluation of AmI Playfield, (ii) illustrates an educational arithmetic game, named Apple Hunt, developed in order to test and validate the AmI playfield environment, and (iii) discusses the evaluation of Apple Hunt in terms of both methodology and results.

Information and Communication technologies have the potential to permeate the classroom and modernize the educational process. However, in the context of a smart classroom, building educational applications poses unique challenges from an HCI perspective, due to the diversity of user and context requirements. This paper introduces a framework that facilitates the design, development and deployment of pervasive educational applications that can automatically transform according to the context of use to ensure their usability. The collection of widgets incorporates both common basic widgets (e.g., buttons, images) and mini interfaces frequently used in educational applications, as ready-to-use modules. The designer can either (i) combine and customize widgets from both categories to build an interface just once, or (ii) build and incorporate it as a custom-made mini interface in the collection for future reuse. Finally, the framework's usability has been evaluated with users obtaining very positive results and potential suggestions for extensions.

Today, augmented reality is evolving towards sophisticated approaches exploiting the opportunities offered by immersive environments and high quality 3D graphics. Such systems can prove to be very useful in the context of education, especially when learning involves reading and writing activities. However, the majority of existing systems relies on touch-based interaction, or on interaction with proprietary technological artifacts. This paper presents an approach to enhancing reading and writing on physical books through smart augmentation. It is based on the intuitive and unobtrusive monitoring of students gestures during reading and writing activities through cameras, facilitating context-aware content sensitive assistance without requiring any special interaction device.

This paper discusses a line of research targeted to investigate and introduce innovative solutions for efficient learning in smart environments through integrating AmI technology in the learning process. Following a discussion of current approaches to technology integration in the classroom, the overall concept of the Student-Centric “Intelligent” Classroom and the related software are described. Potential future improvements are outlined.

This paper discusses a framework that supports collaborative learning activities in smart environments. When designing or developing collaborative environments numerous fundamental requirements should be taken into consideration to maximize their potentials. These best-practices outline strategies regarding (i) group formation, (ii) role assignment, (iii) personalized support, and (iv) activity monitoring. A multi-tier architecture scheme is employed, on top of the “ClassMATE” system, where every module addressees some of these aspects and their combination results in a complete framework that enables both online and offline collaboration in the smart classroom.

This paper introduces a suite of Window Managers purposed for the technologically enhanced classroom. The overall objective is to instantiate a common look and feel across various classroom artifacts, thus providing a unified working environment for the students and teachers. To achieve optimal interaction and application display, the workspaces for each artifact are designed keeping in mind both the platform’s characteristics and the user’s requirements. The usability evaluation of the developed system is reported.

Taking into account the potential of ICT in education and recognizing the need for smart environments and artifacts, this paper presents Study-Buddy, a context aware system aiming to augment the learning process. The system is constituted of an intelligent reading lamp that monitors students’ interaction with reading material and provides appropriate information through any near computational device (e.g., tablet, notebook, etc.). Study-Buddy is accompanied by LexiMedia, an educational software targeted to language learning.

This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) technologies in the context of classroom education, and presents the methodology and preliminary results of the development of an augmented school desk which integrates various AmI educational applications. The overall objective is to assess how AmI technologies can contribute to support common learning activities and enhance the learner’s experience in the classroom. Young learners were involved from the first phases of the design of the desk and its applications using scenario-based techniques.