Spring 2019

On sabbatical leave from the University of Patras. That was an opportunity to visit Edinburgh, Glasgow (the occasion of CHI 2019), London (IFIP technical committee 13 meeting), Thessaloniki. Some cycling in the Scottish Highlands in between. Opportunity to work more on the 2nd edition of the book on 'Introduction of Human-Computer Interaction', to start working on the new open course on web programming to be released by mathesis.cup.gr later this year and most importantly to organise the new Masters Program in Human-Computer Interaction, to admit its first students this October.

January 2019

Presenting a proposal for a Python course for this Spring, through vocational training unit of the University of Patras

Preparing a proposal for a new module in the Computer Science Program of Studies of the Hellenic Open University (with C. Makris of Upatras)

celebrating 50 editions of @UP the University of Patras magazine

Working in preparing the regulations of the new Masters in HCI

November-December 2018

Working on nextMOOC project proposal, submitted to ELIDEK for phase b evaluation.

Participation in VR@GR 24-25 November, Athens, paper by C. Fidas.

Participation in PCI 2018 Special Session on HCI (29 November - 1 December ), Athens, presenting papers.

The second edition of the Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction book was issued by Patras University Press.

October 2018

The Master in Human-Computer Interaction was approved by the Senate of the University of Patras, first students will be accepted in September 2019.

Participated in HCICTE 2018 (19-21 October 2018, Thessaloniki), presenting papers.

September 2018

Participated in Digital Storytelling 2018 conference, we presented with Christos Sintoris paper on micro-narratives in location-based games.

July-August 2018

At the beginning of July the 2nd edition of PowerPython summer school was organised in collaboration with Stavros Dimitriadis of AUTH and Katerina Kabassi from TEI Ionian Islands. It was an opportunity to meet with young enthusiastic people and discuss interesting problems together.

Work on papers for DST2018 (digital story telling), and on a paper for AmI 2018 and HICTE 2018.

June 2018

Working on 4th Edition of our book on Introduction to Computing with Python, with Kyriakos Sgarbas, Vassilis Paliouras, and Michalis Koukias.

On Erasmus visit to Trondheim, NTNU, June 18 to 22. Invited by Prof Monica Divitini, also met with Letizia Jaccheri, Michail Giannakos, Francesco Gianni

During my visit at Trondheim, I met with Barbara Ericson and Marc Guzdial (Georgia Tech). They made some interesting remarks on our book and showed me some of their online ebooks, currently to be translated to Norwegian.

During my visit, I presented a 3-hour course on Design guidelines for Location-based Games.

Also attended FabLearning Europe event and Interaction Design with Children 17th conference, with keynotes by P. Dillenburgh (half Piaget), Kori Inkpen from Microsoft Research

May 2018

Working on a new course on python programming for Raspberry Pi, first outline of the course

Proposal for a new master program in Human-Computer Interaction

The Advanced Python Programming course was delivered online on mathesis.cup.gr It has been attended by over 2K .

April 2018

Preparation of the material (evaluation questions, tests, projects) for Advanced Python Programming course.

Invited talk on Technology and Senior Citizens. (Patras April, 19) [slides]

March 2018

Participation in IFIP TC13 Symposium, Tallinn Estonia.

Proposal preparation for Master in HCI in collaboration with M. Xenos, N. Fakotakis, K. Sgarbas, K. Moustakas, Ch. Fidas, E. Marvomati, N. Marmaras, etc.

February 2018

Completed shooting and editing the new online course 'Advanced Programming with Python', including, section on Object oriented programming with Python, Persistent data, Graphic User Interfaces, and Introduction to Gaming. In total, 84 videos, over 15 hours of videos. Part of the shooting, in Mathesis studios in Herakleio/Crete, the rest home baked stuff.

January 2018

Working on the online course 'Programming with Python' an object oriented approach to be issued later this spring.

December 2017

Tutorial on Location-based games for learning in the frame of IMCL 2017, Thessaloniki

October 2017

Experiencing Indian hospitality, Mumbai. Experiencing what is like to live in a big city. Workshop on Design of Location-based games. Meeting with Indian designers and ICT professionals.

September 2017

Working on a course on Design of location-based mobile game, for Interact 2017 at Mumbai.

Participation in Interact 2017 conference, presentation of two papers.

July 2017

Organised with Stavros Demetriadis and Katerina Kambassi Power Python summer school in Zakynthos 10-14 July 2017.

Organised Liber 2017 conference of European Research Libraries

May June 2017

Working with Stavros Demetriadis and Katerina Kambassi on organizing the Power Python Summer School (July 2017).

Followed the forum of the Introduction to Python MOOC (7.5K participants), impressed with collaboration and peer support by participants.

Visited University of Edinburgh - Dragan Gašević - working on learning analytics

At JRC Ispra, (June 16) discussed with Pierre Pegon and Nacho Llamata about the distributed database of structured engineering labs in Europe.

April 2017

Visited Cyprus University of Technology for Christina's Vassiliou viva, supervised by Andri Ioannou Got the chance to visit the Cyprus Interaction Lab and discuss with Andri on their projects

Gave a workshop on Teaching Python a well attended event. (Athens, April 22)

Attended Educon 2017 Introduce by Monica Divitini from NTNU, to IoT ideation framework tiles. Highlight: keynote by Dragan Gašević from University of Edinburgh

February-March 2017 .... I was engaged with developing two new courses and started playing with the idea of management and development of cultural paths.

The first course was Introduction to Python 1, hosted by mathesis.cup.gr the leading Greek MOOC portal. This is by the way the first Greek language MOOC on a computer science subject.

The challenge was that I decided to produce the videos myself, (underestimated the difficulty of the task), used Quicktime player and Imovie plus hardware I borrowed from the Electro-acoustics Lab (thanks). I received great help from Dimitris and Nick of CUP on editing the quizzes and tests, setting up the platform for code submissions.

The second course is related to introduction to web technologies, is part of the second semester course i teach, and it is going to be hosted by medialearning.upatras.gr

Cultural paths is a new idea we have been introduced into by Ioannis Iliopoulos and Sofia Passa from our Geology Department and Nikoleta Yiannoutsou from our group that researched the issue of participatory governance and cultural paths development and running. Two new students in the lab Pablo, and Vaggelis started their dissertations on this area, while student projects on the game 'Search the landmarks in Uni' lead us to investigate further python and kivy on android ...