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The great ambition of using games as the cornerstone of education is hindered by its associated teaching workload. The BEACONING project developed a framework based on an authoring tool for gamified lesson paths, which has been rolled-out in large scale across Europe. It includes stages for planning game-based educational activities, plus their deployment, monitoring, and assessment.

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Background Self-reported client assessments during online treatments enable the development of statistical models for the prediction of client improvement and symptom development. Evaluation of these models is mandatory to ensure their validity. Methods For this purpose, we suggest besides a model evaluation based on study data the use of a simulation analysis. The simulation analysis provides insight into the model performance and enables to analyse reasons for a low predictive accuracy. In this study, we evaluate a temporal causal model (TCM) and show that it does not provide reliable predictions of clients' future mood levels. Results Based on the simulation analysis we investigate the potential reasons for the low predictive performance, for example, noisy measurements and sampling frequency. We conclude that the analysed TCM in its current form is not sufficient to describe the underlying psychological processes. Conclusions The results demonstrate the importance of model evaluation and the benefit of a simulation analysis. The current manuscript provides practical guidance for conducting model evaluation including simulation analysis.

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Training with Virtual Reality (VR) can bring several benefits, such as the reduction of costs and risks. We present an experimental study that aims to evaluate the effectiveness of a Virtual Environment (VE) to train firefighters using an innovative approach based on a Real Environment (RE) exercise. To measure the VE’s effectiveness we used a Presence Questionnaire (PQ) and participant’s cybersickness, stress and fatigue. Results from the PQ showed that participants rated the VE with high spatial presence and moderate realness and immersion. Signs of stress, analyzed from participant’s Heart-Rate Variability, were shown in the RE but not in the VE. In the remaining variables, there was only an indicative difference for fatigue in the RE. Therefore, the results suggest that although our training VE was successful in giving participants spatial presence and in not causing cybersickness, its realness and immersion provided were not enough to provoke a similar RE response. © 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

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