Teses

The world and its environment are suffering tremendous changes which result in a large impact on the current societie's way of life. Future generations, which will suffer the consequences of these changes, should be taught about what they can do to help prevent further disaster. Computers and games conquered their space in many homes and kids spend hours playing computer games. This work proposes a model for creating a computer game to teach children ecological behavior. This model is based on learning theories and educational game development best practices. To do this we discuss the learning process, educational games, and digital educational game design and look through several educational games. This study resulted in a group of guidelines to develop digital educational games for children. From applying these guidelines and gathering them with research on what ecological subjects should be taught and how, resulted a conceptual model of an educational game for teaching children about ecological behaviors. Furthermore, we created EcoLogic, a game that applies the conceptual model, and a framework for developing this sort of games. Conclusions show that most of the educational games could be improved by following the guidelines presented in this work and that these are a good starting tool for creating educational games and allow creating a vast sort of educational games. Moreover, they show that the model is easy to be followed, presents a clear view of the game and is adapted to the educational purpose.

Nowadays, the social exclusion phenomenon is one of the most concerning issues in human societies. If one could build a model simulating it, one could use such model in educational and pedagogical games, to contribute to show people the phenomenon and stimulate their awareness. The idea is to put users in the role of an excluded person, so that they can get in touch and cope with this reality, while trying to fit in the existing groups. The creation of such model requires exploring socio-psychological sciences? theories to understand the phenomenon and related issues. Therefore, we present a brief overview about human characteristics, such as personality, interpersonal attraction, acceptance and exclusion, group identity and interactions, and their application to synthetic characters. Additionally, we have also analyzed existing systems that approach or explore in some way the above characteristics and made an analysis about their strengths and weaknesses. This allowed the creation of a model that incorporates believable agents, with social behaviour and social exclusion simulation in agents? group dynamics. The model was used to create a demonstration scenario, where the users played in the role of an excluded person.