Of the rapidly growing amount of digital educational material, very little bridges the gap between experimental learning environments and computer-based learning environments. In this paper, a concept that bridges this gap is presented. The concept is based on observations in the subject of home economics in Danish primary and lower secondary school. The work is based on the theory of flow, storyline and computer games. The concept is exemplified by a prototype of a MOO storyline. The prototype proposes a way to integrate the technology in a way that makes use of children's natural curiosity and motivation for game playing combined with the joy of working with food and thus is a step on the road to producing a learning resource in an area that until now has been dominated by electronic recipe managers and digital health-tracking managers. Read more...

Animation of three-dimensional digital characters is still a major hurdle in the production of films and video games. This paper analyzes the technology of autonomous embedded agents as a solution to this challenge. Multi-layering and heterogeneity are chosen as desirable principles for the design of digital characters. The FreeWill+ animation framework has been developed with these principles in mind. Its general structure as well as some of its special features are presented. Automatic action acquisition based on the Q-learning technique has been presented as an extended example of the system capabilities. Read more...