Elias Houstis is Professor Emeritus of the Computer Engineering and Communications department at University of Thessaly. He has been a Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Computational Science & Engineering Program of Purdue University. He participated in several ESPRIT European projects in the area of information technologies. The most recent ones are VHF (An environment for a virtual hypermedia factory) and NANOS (Effective integration of fine-grain parallelism exploitation and multiprogramming). He is in the editorial board of several journals. His research has been supported by the NSF, AFOSR, ARO, DARPA, DOE, ESPRIT, INTEL, IBM, AT&T, Kozo-Japan, Purdue University, Greek Research Foundation.
Hariklia Tsalapatas has a PhD in Computer Engineering with a focus on the development of serious games for learning from the University of Thessaly (2015). She has an MBA from Columbia Business School, NY (2005). She has an MSc Degree in Computer Science from Rice University in Houston, TX (1994). She has a Bachelor’s Degree (5 years) from the University of Patras in Greece. She is engaged as an instructor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department on Technology Enhanced Learning, Game Design, Software Engineering, and other subjects. She has worked on over 40 R&D projects since 1997, 38 of which on behalf of UTH since 2000. Before being employed at UTH she worked as a researcher at the Foundation of Research and Technolology Hellas in Heraklion Greece (1998-2000) and as a database engineer for Oracle Corp. in San Francisco, CA (1993-1997). She has published over 70 articles on technology enhanced learning.
Olivier Heidmann has a Masters Degree in Parallel Computing from the Louis Pasteur University of Strasbourg, France. He also taught computer science, mathematics and management to students ranging from 14 years old to adults. Since 2004, he participated either as technical lead or as a key software and service designer and developer in over 25 different EC-funded projects, using ICT and web-based solutions to enhance teaching and learning methodologies and tools and was a member of the coordinating team for the EnvKids project. He has published several papers at international conferences, including the EDUCA On-line Conference, the CELDA Conference, the Europrix Academic Conference, and more.
Christina Taka has a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of Thessaly. She further has a Bachelor (5 year) Degree in Computer Engineering from the same organization. She works on the design and implementation of technology enhanced learning services, with a focus on serious games and design thinking contributing to the design, implementation, and evaluation of services with stakeholders. The projects she has worked on focus on the development of digital skills, understanding of lean and agile processes in engineering, design thinking for sustainability, development of problem-solving skills, and more.
Nadia Vlahoutsou has a Bachelor Degree in Economics from the University of Athens. She works on technology enhanced learning projects with a focus on entrepreneurship, design thinking, learning content development for addressing the needs of diverse groups, instructor training, and more. The projects she has worked on focus on the development of digital skills, lean and agile processes, sustainability, problem-solving skills in engineering and economics, and more.
Kostas Katsimedes is a graduate of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Thessaly. He works on the design and implementation of serious games as well as internet services for enriching educational experiences of users. Examples include games for building knowledge on agile and lean industrial design, problem-solving skills, digital skills, and more. He further implements digital services that support collaboration in design thinking processes in educational contexts, facilitating the adoption of approaches that are based on empathy, problem-statement definition, ideation, prototyping, and evaluation.
Sotiris Evangelou is a graduate of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Thessaly. He works on the design and implementation of serious games as well as internet services for enriching educational experiences of users. He further implements digital services that support design thinking processes in education. He further implements digital learning games that help develop problem-solving skills among higher education students in a manner that simulates real world industry practices.
Dimitris Vogiatzopoulos is a final year student at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Thessaly. He works on the design and implementation of learning platforms and serous games for building STEM, analytical thinking, programming, and entrepreneurship skills.
Georgios Diamantis is a final year student at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Thessaly. He works on the design and implementation of learning platforms and serous games for building STEM, analytical thinking, programming, and entrepreneurship skills.
External collaborating researchers
Faye Areou works as Special Teaching Staff at the Department of Preschool Education of the University of Thessaly. She collaborates with the Creative Technologies Learning Lab on the design of pedagogical interventions that target preschool and primary education. Currently she works on the analysis of learning needs of school educators for building disaster management skills. She further works on the evaluation of learning interventions that help build STEM skills for adults.