This paper describes a unique learning system that cultivates a positive attitude toward learning through presentation design activities. Learners are assigned two tasks: a declarative knowledge task and a presentation task that involves selecting slides from among a set of slides provided to create a presentation. The slides have been prepared so that some of them are relevant and support the theme of the presentation while others are redundant or may even contain wrong information. A learner model is presented that captures the meta-cognitive activities of learners toward learning as they perform these tasks. Once the various learning attitudes of the learners are known, it should be possible to create a system that offers learning guidance tailored to their different attitudes.

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Reading comprehension is a rather difficult task for students in all the stages of study, especially when they are reading text in a foreign language. In the EFL (English as a foreign language) context, reading is one of the most intriguing and most common research topics. This study investigates the effects of teaching EFL reading comprehension to Japanese students through the Kit-Build concept mapping (KB-mapping) method. In doing so, we have conducted an experiment to compare the student comprehension with KB-mapping and Scratch-Build Concept Mapping (SC-mapping) methods. We gave participants a comprehension test (CT) and a delayed comprehension test (DCT; two weeks after using the mapping methods). By comparing the results of the CT and the DCT for the two conditions groups, we found that using KB-mapping was no better than using SC-mapping for participants understanding the text just after using the methods, but KB-mapping led to better effects in recalling and remembering of the text after a while.

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This paper presents the design and development of a mobile serious game (SG) named MAGNITUDE for training inexperienced disaster volunteers. First, we present interviews with disaster experts to clarify the issues in disaster work and to identify the required criteria for volunteer workers. Second, we explain the survey we did to investigate the subjects’ awareness of ethical issues in a disaster situation. The survey involved 64 subjects, classified into two group, i.e. experienced (Ex) and inexperienced (Ix) who were in high school or the early years of university. The results of the survey showed that the Ix group had less awareness of ethical issues than the Ex group. Based on this finding we have been developing MAGNITUDE to harness its training potential. This SG is envisioned as encouraging Ix volunteers—who usually come in the early periods of disaster response work as spontaneous volunteers—to improve their soft-skill of making decisions ethically.

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