Game@School: Teaching STEM through mobile apps and role-based games

Dealing with digital native students requires new methodologies of teaching. In this work, we describe an approach and a conceptual architecture of a supporting teaching tool that takes into account two main objectives in new teaching trends: Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) and Intelligent Pedagogical Agents (IPAs). The main idea is a VLE that in turn is a role playing game. The game structure follows a quest-based game that is deliberately designed as a system of problem-solving activities aimed at achieving objectives, to be successfully addressed in order to progress and eventually win. The emotional behavior of the IPAs has been built by conducting a study on emotions with high school students. Stemming from the study results, it has been built an Android application that uses the IPA as a standalone application to prove the efficacy of the IPA itself.