In recent years, it has become clear that modern education is not currently equipped with the proper tools to fully support remote teaching. Virtual reality (VR) has the potential to make remote education viable in the future. Nevertheless, many teachers and students lack experience and familiarity with this technology, which poses a challenge to its adoption in education. In this paper, we introduce Puzzle Playground, a game that builds familiarity with VR by teaching object interactions through puzzles in an interactive experience tailored for educators. Players gradually learn VR interactions by completing various puzzle levels. A preliminary user study indicated that people who learned with Puzzle Playground grasped VR interactions faster than those who learned with printed or visual methods.

Learning motor skills is essential to many different aspects of life, from big movements needed for sports to small and simple movements used in the rehabilitation of stroke patients. In recent years, sonification, i.e. using sounds as feedback for actions, has been researched as a promising technique for studying motor behavior. In particular, we explore how to use sonification to make the process of learning motor skills accessible and engaging. We posit that an interactive and gamified environment can increase the engagement in that process. Moreover, an enjoyable setting is more likely to stimulate repetition, an indispensable feature of any learning endeavor. We, therefore, designed and developed Pizzicato, a rhythm-based serious game that leads players to move their arms and hands to actively play music. The game uses a common webcam to track your hand movements: pinching one finger to the thumb at the right position and moment will play musical notes that pleasantly add up to a full musical track. Our player tests have shown that players find Pizzicato accessible and engaging, and report that playing the game gives them a strong sense of agency. Pizzicato was developed in collaboration with neuropsychology colleagues, who are now starting to use it as a flexible tool for motor behavior research, both for diagnostic and rehabilitation purposes.

Disruptive technology has become an integral part of our lives, and it has brought about a significant transformation in the way we interact, communicate, and share information, also in the field of education. Innovation in technology needs to be based on ethics and values of the intended result. As the use of disruptive technology continues to grow, so does the need to understand and consider ethical and value dimensions. How can disruptive technology be developed and used in an ethical way for learning and teaching? What are the values the development and implementation of disruptive technology for education should take into account? How to measure and evaluate values and ethical dimensions of disruptive technology for educational purposes? Are some of the important questions to address. This workshop paper presents a method for eliciting values and ethical dimensions of learning scenarios with disruptive technologies in vocational and higher education settings and illustrates its implementation in the context of the Horizon Europe e-DIPLOMA project. The workshop method, combining value cards and learning scenarios with disruptive technologies, was implemented in seven different countries. The preliminary results of the workshops are presented. The method has the potential to draw peoples’ attention to prospective value concerns and ethical aspects necessary for understanding and acknowledging the consequence of implementing disruptive technologies in education.