Multimodality in Game-based Learning Environments

Game-based learning environments represents one particular type of edutainment applications that have the great potential to support learning contexts, as they provide a new form of engagement that is participatory and collaborative. In these environments, multimodal interfaces play a fundamental role for the achievement of a high degree of interactivity during the learning process. Multimodal interfaces, indeed, by enabling the combined use of speech and gesture and various physical and virtual avatars and metaphors, allows the learner to directly interact with the learning objects. This active involvement has the great potential to produce good results in terms of motivation, understanding and longterm acquisition of contents, compared to the traditional learning methods based on the passive reading of books. In fact, the use of integrated multiple input modes provides users to benefit from flexible and powerful dialogue approaches, as how an our previous work (Caschera et al., 2007) has underlined through the analysis and formalization of the main features of multimodal interaction and systems.