In this thesis we are presenting a design-based research aimed to extend an existing mobile-based environment named “Treasure-HIT”. “Treasure-HIT” is an environment which uses the available mobile technology to enable teachers to conduct pedagogical “Treasure Hunt” games for their students. At baseline (January 2013), “Treasure-HIT” was at its early stages and has not yet been officially released; only a few teachers were granted access to it. The goal of this thesis was to test the system with teachres in order to understand the actual needs to detect difficulties and usabily limitations and to improve the system accordingy.The sudy was conducted as a design-based research that included three iterations. Within each iteration we have identified needs expressed by teachers and improved the relevant system features. The outcome of this thesis was the design, development and implementation of 7 different features that increased the usability of the “Treasure-HIT” environment and its potential to effectievy support the creation and enactment of pedagogical location based activities.

Communication is a fundamental social component of human life and constitutes an indispensable factor in the learning process as it allows the transfer of information between people. Communication supports the interactions that take place in different learning stages and settings and can encourage involvement and cooperation. The "Treasure-HIT" platform, a dedicated environment for designing pedagogical mobile location-based games, encourages social interaction and collaborative learning. This platform, which is social at its base, has limited communication capabilities. Adding such capabilities can overcome this difficulty by providing a more supportive and interpersonal interaction among the involved stakeholders. This thesis explores the users' communication needs for the preparation and enactment of "Treasure-HIT" activities. A design based research was used to analyze the needs in terms of design and technological specifications and develop and implement communication features. Three such features were developed in the course of this thesis: (1) Activities based map, (2) Social media sharing feature (Facebook tasks) and (3) Image gallery. All of those aimed at supporting communication between learners, instructors and their community, before, during and after the activities. Findings show that the developed capabilities enabled new means of communication and contributed to the user experience and learning process. Users appreciated the functionality and ease of use and positively adopted the new features.