Fernando Gamboa Rodríguez

Evaluating Play-Personas of an Educational 3D Digital Game for University Students to Learn Portuguese as a Foreign Language

This work is part of a user centered design development research with 106 international university students from 27 nationalities who were living in Brazil, Mexico and Portugal, which resulted in the game design and programming of the 3D Adventure Game to learn Foreign Languages “Back to the knowledge – the foreign student and the book of language and culture”. With the proposal of exploring a new approach of learning a foreign language in autonomy through an educational game and its development according to the needs and expectations of its targeted audience; this two years project started in 2014 by conducting interviews for creation of university students’ Personas. This article presents the last users evaluations in the perspective of Play-Personas. The quantitatively and qualitative analysis of ten students play ways compiled player preferences and behaviors in terms of interaction and navigation in five Play-Personas and allowed to contrast them to the initial Persona.

Design of a System for Automated Generation of Problem Fields

We describe the design of a computer system for problem field generation in mathematics. The concept of problem fieldrefers to a sequence of related problems. The relationship between the problems assures that their successive solution promotes deep learning of the topic (sequence problems). We define four relations between the fields problems: difficulty and rule, question or property preservation. The problems difficulty is given by problem-type, algebraic complexity and difficulties of the problems question and rule used for solution. A problem field based on difficulty will modify one of the above elements in order to get new problems from existing ones. In rule- and property-preserving generation the fields problems differ in their type or difficulty level. In question preserving generation the problems maintain the initial problems unknown. Once the details of the change are established the new problem will be generated using templates, rules and examples.