Collaborative puzzles for the study of the periodic table of elements in a virtual world

Collaborative games are being increasingly used in educational platforms in order to promote specific learning skills among students through specific ludic experiences. Virtual worlds can also contribute to offer students a unique environment exploring knowledge domains while interacting with other students. This paper describes an innovative virtual world application that incorporates collaborative puzzles in order to support learning concepts related to the periodic table of elements in the context of a middle school study program. The paper provides a description of the virtual world and its games, the general system architecture, the main graphical user interfaces and validation results.