Thesis

Conflict is something that cannot be avoided in life. At a social level, it is of great importance to solve conflicts the best way possible, as an unresolved or badly handled conflict can lead to unpredictable events and have negative consequences for everyone involved. The goal of this work is to design and validate an educational serious video game that supports educators in their task of teaching children about conflict and conflicts resolution. This work represents a new approach to conflict resolution software as it creates a safe environment in which children can experiment different ways to handle conflict situations and understand what an why those decisions have specific outcomes. To achieve this, the proposed game design implements several concepts from social and psychological theories of conflict into the rules and mechanics of the game, following several learning theories and design principles from the field of educational video games. This document presents the research concerning the two main fields of this work, conflict and educational video games. The rules and game mechanics are then presented along with the educational principles followed to obtain that game design. It is then detailed the development of a prototype which was used to validate the design with children. Several tools to support the design were also implemented, including a game simulator and several playing strategies which allowed to balance the game. Finally this work describes the implementation and results obtained using and adaptation model which allows teachers to personalize the game experience.

Given its enormous potential Interactive Storytelling has been the subject of many academic research in recent time. The promise to create a story capable to adapt and mould itself to the person who is experiencing it has several implications specially when we are talking about the Entertainment Industry. However, this does not come freely. The creation of such stories has been a thorn on its paw since its inception. Due to this fact the lion's share of investigation has been around the authoring part of Interactive Storytelling with some results in recent times but still with a very troubled existence where only experts are capable of creating stories. The approach taken to solve this problem consists in using the power of collaboration and team work to solve the many issues identified that currently limit the Interactive Storytelling world. Since there is little to no work in the field of Group Authoring for Interactive Storytelling the work made was mainly of creation, of testing a new approach with some help from the work developed for 'normal authoring'. To demonstrate the research's results a prototype named StoryColla of an authoring collaborative system was created. A prototype that not only allows for the creation of Interactive Stories collaboratively it also does not require any type of programming expertise to be used.

In this document, we delve into the world of sports and E-Sports broadcasting. We will show how we investigated and built what is the first step into building a fully functional real-time automatic broadcasting system, that may assist commentators with the live broadcasting of e-sports. We have looked into the industry, observing their tactics and difficulties, and thus have developed a solution we believe is able to show the spectator enough relevant events during the course of game progress, correctly, that the spectator fully understands the chains of cause and effect behind the different competitive states of the match. We believe this is a worthwhile first step to a much more perfected realtime broadcasting system that may come in the future.

In the software industry, albeit wide spread techniques to make the development cycle more agile, it is not easy for a company to implement, maintain and deliver tools that support the learning stages of their users. As such, the learning processes and tools tend to receive fewer budget on the product backlog. With this in consideration, a framework for computer assisted learning was devised. This framework is intended to increase the subject matter retention rate, minimize the learners? frustration levels, while keeping the development and maintenance costs low. The learning curve presented by an Integrated Development Environment is discussed. The embedded tutorial system built in OutSystems IDE presents low retention rates, which makes users perform poorly when a transfer test is presented. This dissertation presents a framework which tries improve theperformance of the users after being exposed to a tutorial, without increasing frustration levels. The several components of the framework are detailed and it is argued that the framework can be implemented on other inherently complex tools aside from IDE?s. It is also discussed how the embedded tutorial system was extended with the developed framework and the yielded results. The challenge lies in combining the simplicity of interactive tutorial systems, with the tailoring offered by Intelligent Tutoring Systems. This approach presents some degree of adaptation to the learner, while keeping the product simple. It provides a minimal viable product that is able to soften the learning curve of inherently complex applications.