Jean-Marc Labat

The six facets of serious game design: a methodology enhanced by our design pattern library

Serious games rely on two main types of competence and expertise: the game designers and the teachers. One of the main problems in creating a serious game that is both amusing and educational, and efficiently so, is building a cooperative environment allowing both types of experts to understand each other and communicate with a common language. The aim of this paper is to create such a language using Design Patterns based on our framework: the Six Facets of Serious Game Design. If many design patterns already exist for the game design aspects, they are in short supply on the pedagogical side.

SeGAE: A Serious Game Authoring Environment

Game-based learning or serious game is becoming an important trend in e-learning research area because it seems address several typical e-learning problems such as high dropout rates due to frustration and the lack of motivation to continue studying and the cognitive overload of the learner. However, an important problem of serious games is the difficulty for instructors to adapt the storyboard, the scripts and the game levels of the videogame to new pedagogical objectives once the game development is achieved. This paper presents SeGAE, an author-friendly environment that offers to instructors a set of editors in order to modify the game design by defining new characters, objectives, victory conditions, authorised actions among other objects in the serious games even after the development stage. Particularly, we apply our authoring approach on Blossom Flowers, a serious game developed by Ktm Advance.

Learners' navigation behavior identification based on trace analysis

Identifying learners’ behaviors and learning preferences or styles in a Web-based learning environment is crucial for organizing the tracking and specifying how and when assistance is needed. Moreover, it helps online course designers to adapt the learning material in a way that guarantees individualized learning, and helps learners to acquire meta-cognitive knowledge. The goal of this research is to identify learners’ behaviors and learning styles automatically during training sessions, based on trace analysis. In this paper, we focus on the identification of learners’ behaviors through our system: Indicators for the Deduction of Learning Styles. We shall first present our trace analysis approach. Then, we shall propose a ‘navigation type’ indicator to analyze learners’ behaviors and we shall define a method for calculating it. To this end, we shall build a decision tree based on semantic assumptions and tests. To validate our approach, and improve the proposed calculation method, we shall present and discuss the results of two experiments that we conducted.

Petri Nets and Ontologies: Tools for the "Learning Player" Assessment in Serious Games

Serious games are now an increasingly used tool in business training. The question of the effectiveness of such devices on learning is a research issue. The indicators provided at the end of a video game are insufficient to understand and follow the path of a learning player. It is therefore necessary to track not only the players actions but also to provide tools in order to analyze and diagnose the knowledge acquisition of the learner. We developed an approach based on Petri nets, used to model the accurate behavior of the player. We complete this tool with ontology to explain learners mistakes.

QUIZ, a Distributed Intelligent Tutoring System

QUIZ is a Distributed Intelligent Tutoring System for learning bridge bidding. A set of generic tasks is distributed among four specialists (a tutor, a problem solver, an explainer and a problem generator), who perform their tasks in parallel. These agents are heterogeneous. They own a private working memory and communicate by asynchronous messages passing. Increasing flexibility is a key point in improving the pedagogical capacities of ITS. The strategic level of flexibility results from the determination of the curriculum, the choice of the pedagogical strategy and the degree of expertise used in the problem solver. The choices made at this level must be based mainly upon the student model. The tactical level of flexibility results from the choice of exercise, the advising, the corrections and the explanations. In QUIZ, the pedagogical actions are gathered and sequenced by means of plans, which are chosen by metarules and dynamically assembled from pieces that are memorized in libraries.

Building on the Case Teaching Method to Generate Learning Games Relevant to Numerous Educational Fields

University teachers often feel the need to try innovative learning technologies such as Learning Games to motivate the new generation of students. However, the typically limited resources of universities coupled with the high cost of designing and developing Learning Games result in it rarely being feasible to meet this need. To address this challenging problem, we have designed a framework that allows teachers to create their own Learning Games with very little or no help from developers and graphic designers. This framework, tested and validated by several university teachers, is suited to a wide variety of educational fields because it generates Learning Games based on the widely-used case teaching method.

MoPPLiq: A Model for Pedagogical Adaptation of Serious Game Scenarios

In order to help teachers adapt the educational scenarios of Serious Games to their specific needs, we have built a model called MoPPliq capable of formalizing the flow of activities in the game. This model integrates all the functionalities necessary to allow teachers to restructure the Serious Game scenario without altering the logic of the games storyline. In this paper, we describe the MoPPliq model and discuss our evaluation of its expressivity by using model transformation.

A design pattern library for mutual understanding and cooperation in serious game design

With serious games (SG) design it is difficult to offset fun and learning, especially when commercial partners, with different goals and methods, are involved. To produce an effective combination of fun and learning, we present our Design Pattern Library to address this issue. This library is aimed to help teachers fully take part in serious game design and to encourage mutual understanding between the different stakeholders enhancing cooperation.

Indicators for Deducting the Learners' Learning Styles: Case of the Navigation Typology Indicator

Research in individual differences and in particular, learning and cognitive style, has become a basis to consider learner preferences in a web-based educational context. How learner’s learning style influences his/her navigation behavior has been investigated by several studies, which indicate that we can deduce the learning style from the navigation behavior. In this paper, we propose an indicator of “navigation typology”. We detail the way in which this indicator is calculated, based on tracks analysis, which are aggregated into low and intermediate level indicators to determine the value of the navigation typology.

Model and authoring tool to help teachers adapt serious games to their educational contexts

After a study, we established that one of the obstacles of the adoption of serious games (SGs) by teachers was that they cannot shape their educational scenarios to their specific teaching context. The work we present in this paper tackles the general problem of designing tools to help them customise the educational scenarios of SGs. Our approach is to provide a model suited to describe SGs that are composed of several stages, and to provide its implementation in an authoring tool in order to help the teachers to visualise, modify and check the consistency of the scenarios. The evaluation of our model shows that it is capable of describing most of the SGs we targeted, and the first user tests of our authoring tool prototype are also promising.