Raquel M. Crespo García

Game-based learning aims at getting people to
learn about a certain subject or to acquire certain skills
by means of playing. Educational games must fulfill both
recreational and didactic goals in order to succeed. This
paper introduces a Pac-Man like educational game,
designed to learn orthography and foreign language
vocabulary. A brief description of the game is provided,
together with the results of experimental evaluation.
Experimental data include subjective opinions about
entertainment and learning potential credited by the
students and objective measures of learning
improvements. Reported results demonstrate that the
developed game successfully fulfills the entertainment
requirements, while achieving a significant learning
effectiveness.

Using a team-work, project-based methodology
is a common approach when teaching Artificial
Intelligence. However, a major drawback of such
approach is that AI courses comprise a wide syllabus
composed of quite independent topics. In consequence,
students focus on one single topic from the entire course
contents: although deep learning of such topic is probably
ensured, learning of the rest of the contents is also
probably much more superficial. In this paper, peer
review is proposed as a complement to project-based
learning. Students work not only on their project about a
chosen topic, but also review peers' projects on distinct
topics, providing them with a wider comprehension of the
global syllabus of the course. Empirical results of the
application of this approach to an actual course on
Artificial Intelligence for senior students in
Telecommunication Engineering are presented too.
Analysis focuses on the effects of the reviewing task, as it is
the one which broadens students learning. Positive results
have been achieved, thus validating the interest of peer
review as a useful instrument for learning improvement.

Peer review has been widely used in multiple contexts
ranging from childhood education to academic research. Numerous documents describe different aspects of the reviewing process. Interestingly, barely any discussion is found about how to better match peer assessors and assesses. In this paper an application of peer review in an educational environment is presented. In such context, it is considered as a pedagogical tool to improve the overall learning experience. It is shown that by carefully assigning reviewers to authors, peer review can be oriented to maximize the benefits of the process. Normally, the mapping between authors and reviewers is simplified to a blinded, random association. The proposed adaptive strategy suggests an effective method for assigning reviewers and authors depending on user profiles and based on fuzzy classification techniques. The strategy requires a set of prototypes (typical authorreviewer pairs) and a set of corresponding weights specifying the interest of each prototype. Genetic algorithms are used to obtain a solution to optimize the assignments of reviewers to authors.

Student assessment plays a fundamental part in every e-learning process, where it can serve to check whether the learner has achieved the intended learning outcomes (summative assessment), but also as a means to aid in the learning itself (formative assessment). ...