Abstract
The use of digital games as support tools for education has proven to be effective. To explore their potential, it is crucial to design them carefully. This chapter considers the design of games for education, where players cultivate their knowledge and practice their skills by multiplying numerous hindrances during gaming. Educational elements are integrated into the gameplay, which players acquire while playing. The game's effectiveness depends on the players' ability to form a cheerful and encouraging environment to continue playing while increasing their interest in gameplay and improving academic performance. Following a design-first development approach, an innovative proposal for this design is presented, adding a new dimension to the game's tetrad: learning dynamics. Benefiting from years of professional practice, this game pentad design framework fulfills the learning and user experience requirements while overcoming the design limitations of more conventional approaches not based on an educational purpose.

Abstract
Climate change affects global temperature and precipitation patterns. These effects, in turn, influence the intensity and, in some cases, the frequency of extreme environmental events, such as forest fires, hurricanes, heat waves, floods, droughts, and storms. In general, these events can be particularly conducive to the appearance of plant pests and diseases. The availability of models and a data collection system is crucial to manage pests and diseases in sustainable agricultural ecosystems. Agricultural ecosystems are known to be complex, multivariable, and unpredictable. It is important to anticipate crop pests and diseases in order to improve its control in a more ecological and economical way (e.g., precision in the use of pesticides). The development of an intelligent monitoring and management platform for the prevention of pests and diseases in olive groves at Trás-os- Montes region will be very beneficial. This platform must: a) integrate data from multiple data sources such as sensory data (e.g., temperature), biological observations (e.g., insect counts), georeferenced data (e.g., altitude) or digital images (e.g., plant images); b) systematize these data into a regional repository; c) provide relevant forecasts for pest and diseases. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can be a valuable tool for the identification and classification of images acquired by Internet of Things (IoT).

Abstract
In Portugal, the dropout rate of university courses is around 29%. Understanding the reasons behind such a high desertion rate can drastically improve the success of students and universities. This work applies existing data mining techniques to predict the academic dropout mainly using the academic grades. Four different machine learning techniques are presented and analyzed. The dataset consists of 331 students who were previously enrolled in the Computer Engineering degree at the Universidade de Tras-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD). The study aims to detect students who may prematurely drop out using existing methods. The most relevant data features were identified using the Permutation Feature Importance technique. In the second phase, several methods to predict the dropouts were applied. Then, each machine learning technique's results were displayed and compared to select the best approach to predict academic dropout. The methods used achieved good results, reaching an Fl-Score of 81% in the final test set, concluding that students' marks somehow incorporate their living conditions.

Abstract

Abstract
Narratives are used to convey information and are an important way of understanding the world through information sharing. With the increasing development in Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, it becomes relevant to explore new techniques to extract, process, and visualize narratives. Narrative visualization tools enable a news story reader to have a different perspective from the traditional format, allowing it to be presented in a schematic way, using representative symbols to summarize it. We propose a new narrative visualization approach using icons to represent important narrative elements. The proposed visualization is integrated in Brat2Viz, a narrative annotation visualization tool that implements a pipeline that transforms text annotations into formal representations leading to narrative visualizations. To build the icon visualization, we present a narrative element extraction process that uses automatic sentence extraction, automatic translation methods, and an algorithm that determines the actors' most adequate descriptions. Then, we introduce a method to create an icon dictionary, with the ability to automatically search for icons. Furthermore, we present a critical analysis and user-based evaluation of the results resorting to the responses collected in two separate surveys. © 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors

Abstract
User experience can be affected by the amount and intensity of information presented. Four scenarios were developed to assess the insertion of information elements (chronometer and hint system) and tested with 37 users to find out if they affected the user's sense of presence and symptoms of cybersickness. In order to instruct users and using virtual reality using the Unity 3D game engine, we created a virtual world where the user has the role of exploring the environment and looking for mushrooms, and can consult a description about it. For tests with users, the IPQp and SSQ questionnaires were applied. The results indicate that it is possible to create a virtual world with the addition of informational components without significantly disturbing the user experience. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.