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In human culture, storytelling is a long-established tradition. The reasons people tell stories are manifold: to entertain, to transfer knowledge between generations, to maintain cultural heritage, or to warn others of dangers. With the emergence of the digitisation of media, many new possibilities to tell stories in serious and non-entertainment contexts emerged. A very simple example is the idea of serious gaming, as in, digital games without the primary purpose of entertainment. In this paper, we introduce the term serious storytelling as a new potential media genre – defining serious storytelling as storytelling with a purpose beyond entertainment. We also put forward a review of existing potential application areas, and develop a framework for serious storytelling. We foresee several application areas for this fundamental concept, including wellbeing and health, medicine, psychology, education, ethical problem solving, e-leadership and management, qualitative journalism, serious digital games, simulations and virtual training, user experience studies, and online communication.

In a two-day educational robotics workshop in a Namibian primary boarding school, learners with no programming skills managed to apply both computational and design thinking skills with the aid of educational robotics. Educational robotics has proved to be an area which enhances learning both computational thinking and design thinking. An educational robotics (ER) workshop focusing on Arduino robotics technologies was conducted with primary school learners at Nakayale Private Academy. Observation methods through watching, listening and video recordings were used to observe and analyze how the learners were interacting throughout the workshop. Based on the results, it was concluded that this approach could be applied in classrooms to enable the primary school learners apply computational and design thinking in preparation of becoming the producers and not only the consumers of the 4IR technologies.

User-centricity and usability are a premise of digitalization, a current trend for business model innovation based on advanced digital technologies. The article addresses a gap in the literature, in which descriptions of the cases of updating university curricula in usability are lacking. This gap also exists in the practice. The study uses the example of a project for revising the content of usability courses at the University of Turku as a case. The research objective is to explore an integrative approach to usability education. For this, we consider the data collected via interviews with the faculty teaching usability subjects. Thematic analysis is applied to examine the interview outcomes. Recommendations as to updating usability curricula are provided.

Location-based applications (LBAs) capture the user’s physical location via satellite navigation sensors and integrate it as part of the digital application. Because of this connection, the real-world environment needs to be accounted for in LBA design. In this work, we focused on creating a database of geographically distributed points of interest (PoIs) that is optimal for learning local history. First, we conducted a requirements elicitation study at three outdoor archaeological sites and identified issues in existing solutions. Second, we designed a multi-layered prototype solution. Third, we evaluated the solution with nine experts who had prior experience with LBAs or similar systems. We incorporated their feedback to our design to iteratively improve it. As a whole, our work contributes to the LBA design literature by proposing a solution that is optimized for the learning of local history.

Music composing is associated with various positive learning outcomes, but in several countries, such as Finland, it is not part of the primary school music curriculum. There are several issues as to why music composing is not taught at schools, such as beliefs that composing requires extensive knowledge of music theory, lack of teachers’ confidence, lack of evidence on the method’s effectiveness and difficulty of assessment. Composing software has the potential of solving some of these issues, as they are connected to mathematics via music theory and technology, and with practical opportunities arising from adopting phenomenon-based learning at schools, the affordances of music composing technologies for learning mathematics are investigated in this study. For this purpose, 57 music composing software were categorised and reviewed. Our analysis identified eight types of music visualisations and five types of note input methods. The music visualisations were compared to the mathematics content in the Finnish primary school curriculum and the note input methods were evaluated based on their relationship to the music visualisations. The coordinate grid-based piano roll was the most common visualisation and the tracker visualisation had the most affordances for learning primary school math. Music composing software were found to have affordances for teaching mathematical concepts, notations and basic calculus skills, among others. Composing methods involving direct interaction with visualisations support the experiential learning of music theory, and consequently, the learning of mathematics. Based on the findings of this study, we concluded that music composing is a promising activity through which mathematics and music theory can be learned at primary schools.

Digital presence refers to technologies that provide communities a shared experience and a sense of togetherness, despite geographical distance. Emerging technologies for digital presence provide the church with both theological questions (e.g. related to the validity of sacraments when administered online) and practical opportunities. Think of the pros and cons for online communion in some churches: is digital presence real presence? The digital realm as a thread of the universe leads to rethinking of the church as a social, digital and physical unity. What kind of new possibilities could digital presence in digital realities provide to spiritual experience, individually and within the worship? Contribution Rather than a plain application of the existing technologies to digitise the current functions and events of congregations for online services, technology should expand and reform the church online. This study aims to discuss the transformation from online church to church online. The technical solution for digital presence was inspired by the demands of a Finnish plug-in campus in an African setting, which draws inspiration from African concepts of community and place.

The open monitoring environment (OME) uses a novel data-mining approach to enhance teachers' pedagogical interventions in a robotics class. According to earlier studies, decision trees resulting from an open and semi-automatic data-mining process are practically useful when classifying subsequently data arising from a robotics class. The current study shows that data-mining features of the OME can be used to predict and, hence, support learning processes also with real-time data. Results show that the data-mining features of the OME are affected by the nature and amount of data when working with a small number of students. Furthermore, the results show that the robotics-class instructors are able to modify the learning environment to match to the current context in a way that goes beyond normal teacher activities in a classroom. This role blending between a teacher and a software developer in a learning environment provides a novel way to build a personalized and contextualized support environment for a robotics class.

A critical aspect of designing and running online study programs is the identification of factors and elements that could potentially threaten the continuation of studies. In this study, we first identified a set of critical events that occurred in the running of a Finnish online doctoral study program over 16 years. Next, we analyzed the events using a four-pillar sustainability model, which consisted of the economic, social, environmental, and ethical pillars. We detected several contextually relevant and dynamic pivotal factors related to each of the pillars, which had effects on the sustainability of the program at the time of the critical events. The analysis revealed that positive pivotal factors in one sustainability pillar can be used to compensate for negative pivotal factors in the other pillars. Two aspects that were crucial for the sustainability of the online doctoral study program were the resilience and shared commitment of the community involved in its activities, which helped in overcoming any challenges encountered. Based on this study, we recommended that future research should design novel solutions that help online study programs to proactively identify potential critical events and related pivotal factors. Furthermore, studies should find creative approaches for constructively coping with critical events that have been identified.

Technology-enhanced learning generally focuses on the cognitive rather than the affective domain of learning. This multi-method evaluation of the INBECOM project (Integrating Behaviourism and Constructivism in Mathematics) was conducted from the point of view of affective learning levels of Krathwohl et al. (1964). The research questions of the study were: (i) to explore the affective learning experiences of the three groups of participants (researchers, teachers and students) during the use of a mobile game UFractions and an intelligent tutoring system ActiveMath to enhance the learning of fractions in mathematics; and (ii) to determine the significance of the relationships among the affective learning experiences of the three groups of participants (researchers, teachers and students) in the INBECOM project.This research followed a sequential, equal status, multi-mode research design and methodology where the qualitative data were derived from the interviews with researchers, teachers and students, as well as from learning diaries, feelings blogs, and observations (311 documents) across three contexts (South Africa, Finland, and Mozambique). The qualitative data was quantitized (Saldaña, 2009), i.e. analysed deductively in an objective and quantifiable way as instances on an ExcelT spreadsheet for statistical analyses. All the data was explored from the affective perspective by labelling the feelings participants experienced according to the affective levels of the Krathwohl et al. (1964) framework.The researchers concluded that: (i) the research participants not only received information, but actively participated in the learning process; responded to what they learned; associated value to their acquired knowledge; organised their values; elaborated on their learning; built abstract knowledge; and adopted a belief system and a personal worldview; and (ii) affirmation of affective learning at all five levels was recognised among the three groups of participants. The study raised a number of issues which could be addressed in future, like how affective levels of learning are intertwined with cognitive levels of learning while learning mathematics in a technology-enhanced learning environment; and how pedagogical models which take into account both cognitive and affective aspects of learning support deep learning.

Storytelling is one of the earliest forms of knowledge transfer, and parents often use it for teaching their children values and knowledge. Formal schooling, however, is less inclined to use storytelling as a vehicle for knowledge transfer, and even less as a vehicle for modern self-directed, student-centered, and constructionist pedagogy. Research literature reports experiences on student-centered storytelling in schools, but there is little information about such learning environments using modern information technology. Using a case study approach, we collected qualitative data from a workshop that tested a number of constructionist pedagogical approaches and one-to-one computing technology in a hypercontextualized storytelling workshop. In that workshop, which took place in a Tanzanian primary school, pupils used their XO-1 laptops as digital media tools for expressing their dreams and solutions to overcoming challenges in life. Results of this study suggest that digital storytelling offers additional advantages when compared to traditional storytelling. Designers need to follow six principles for a successful digital storytelling workshop: commitment, contextual grounding, previous exposure to the context, involvement of local experts, atmosphere of trust, and realistic flexible planning.