Ángel Serrano-Laguna

Tracing a Little for Big Improvements: Application of Learning Analytics and Videogames for Student Assessment☆

Abstract Assessment is essential to establish the failure or success of any educational activity. To measure the acquisition of the knowledge covered by the activity and also to determine the effectiveness of the activity itself. The increasing adoption of new technologies is promoting the use of new types of activities in schools, like educational video games that in some cases are developed by the teachers themselves. In this kind of activity, interactivity increases compared to traditional activities (e.g. reading a document), which can be a powerful source of data to feed learning analytics systems that infer knowledge about the effectiveness of the educational process. In this paper, we discuss how a part of the students’ assessment can be achieved semi-automatically by logging the interaction with educational video games. We conclude that even the application of rather simple tracking techniques means an advantage compared to other systems that are fed with less quality data.

Application of Learning Analytics in educational videogames

Abstract Assessment of learning contents, learning progress and learning gain is essential in all learning experiences. New technologies promote the use of new types of contents like educational videogames. They are highly interactive compared to more traditional activities and they can be a powerful source of data for all forms of assessment. In this paper, we discuss how to apply Learning Analytics (LA) with assessment purposes, studying how students interact with games. One of the biggest barriers for this approach is the variety of videogames, with many genres and types. This makes it difficult to create a comprehensive LA model for educational games that can be generally applied. In order to maintain manageable costs, we propose a two-step approach to apply LA: we first identify simple generic traces and reports that could be applied to any kind of game, and then build game-specific assessment rules based on combinations of these generic traces. This process aims to achieve a balance between the complexity and reusability of the approach, resulting in more scalable LA models for game-based learning. We also test this approach in two preliminary case studies where we explore the use of these techniques to cover different forms of assessment.

Game Learning Analytics: Learning Analytics for Serious Games

Video games have become one of the largest entertainment industries, and their power to capture the attention of players worldwide soon prompted the idea of using games to improve education. However, these educational games, commonly referred to as serious games, face different challenges when brought into the classroom, ranging from pragmatic issues (e.g. a high development cost) to deeper educational issues, including a lack of understanding of how the students interact with the games and how the learning process actually occurs. This chapter explores the potential of data-driven approaches to improve the practical applicability of serious games. Existing work done by the entertainment and learning industries helps to build a conceptual model of the tasks required to analyze player interactions in serious games (gaming learning analytics or GLA). The chapter also describes the main ongoing initiatives to create reference GLA infrastructures and their connection to new emerging specifications from the educational technology field. Finally, it explores how this data-driven GLA will help in the development of a new generation of more effective educational games and new business models that will support their expansion. This results in additional ethical implications, which are discussed at the end of the chapter.

Towards universal game development in education: automatic and semiautomatic methodologies

Serious games are increasingly being used in education to support the development of skills that future professionals and citizens require. However, the inclusion of games in the curricula can threaten the universal right to education for students with disabilities if they are not designed to be accessible. In this paper we discuss the need for tools that assist educators and educational content providers in producing games that are equally accessible for all. The goal is to minimize the cost and effort needed for introducing accessibility in serious games. We discuss to what extent the process of making a serious game accessible can be automated and supported by software tools that minimize human intervention. We conclude that there is a set of common accessibility barriers, especially those related to interaction and physical disabilities, that can be addressed systematically in a high proportion and therefore could be dealt with by software. Other problems, especially those more close to structure, storyboard and design, still need direct intervention from the game authors, but could be facilitated with appropriate methodologies and auditing tools.

A methodology for assessing the effectiveness of serious games and for inferring player learning outcomes

Although serious games are proven to serve as educational tools in many educational domains, there is a lack of reliable, automated and repeatable methodologies that measure their effectiveness: what do players know after playing serious games? Do they learn from them? Previous research shows that the vast majority of serious games are assessed by using questionnaires, which is in stark contrast to current trends in the video game industry. Commercial videogame developers have been learning from their players through Game Analytics for years via non-disruptive game tracking. In this paper, we propose a methodology for assessing serious game effectiveness based on non-disruptive in-game tracking. The methodology involves a design pattern that structures the delivery of educational goals through a game. This structure also allows one to infer learning outcomes for each individual player, which, when aggregated, determine the effectiveness of a serious game. We tested the methodology by having 320 students play a serious game. The proposed methodology allowed us to infer players’ learning outcomes, to assess the game effectiveness levels and to identify issues in the game design.

Creating Interactive Content in Android Devices: The Mokap Hackaton

We propose the organization of a Mokap hackathon. In this activity participants will have the opportunity to develop interactive content using the Mokap Android app, either individually or in groups. Mokap is a new authoring tool for creating interactive content, developed by the e-UCM research group. It allows composing scenes by combining text, hand drawings, pictures and elements imported from an online repository. Mokap also supports basic animation and interaction. Users can take advantage of this functionality to create presentations, training materials, simulations, postcards and even simple games. We will start the activity with an introduction to Mokap, followed by a quick demo. Then we will help participants design their own mokaps and implement them. At the end of the activity participants will be given the possibility to share their mokaps with the rest of the audience. Participants will vote online to choose the best mokap developed during the session, which will be awarded a symbolic prize.

Building a Scalable Game Engine to Teach Computer Science Languages

Every day, more people are interested in learning computer science (CS), either to improve their skill set to apply for new jobs or just for personal growth. The sector of the population looking for instruction on these subjects has increased and diversified. We need new tools that appeal to this wider audience, and game-based learning is one of the most promising approaches at the moment. There is a need for more scalable game-based instruction paradigms that can be easily adapted to different levels of complexity and content related to CS (different programming languages, different programming paradigms, and so on). Throughout this paper, we present a flexible and scalable architecture to create videogames for learning CS languages. The architecture is based on the idea that students control the game using small pieces of text written in some CS language. The keys of the scalability of our approach are: 1) it separates the CS language used to write the programs from the game design and 2) the game model provides a system of levels that allows incremental learning of CS language structures. As validation and implementation of our approach, we developed Lost in Space, an educational videogame to teach the XML markup language. In this game, the player travels through several levels, guiding a spaceship by introducing small pieces of XML in a text console. Players can move and rotate the ship among other power-ups that get unblocked as they advances in the game. The game was tested with undergraduate students from CS and social sciences, by comparing it with traditional instruction (i.e., a teacher with a slides presentation). Students who played the game were much more engaged than those who attended the lecture, showing a more active attitude throughout the whole experience and also spent more time practicing after class. Findings also suggest that the game was effective for instruction, regardless of the background of the students. However, the educational gain observed with the game-based instructional approach, although effective, was not significantly higher than traditional instruction. We think that our approach is adequate to introduce CS languages in general, as well as new programming languages, and seems to be more appealing to new comers than traditional instruction.