Maurice Hendrix

Educational games - Are they worth the effort? A literature survey of the effectiveness of serious games

Over the last decade educational games have become more and more popular. There are many games specifically designed as educational games, as well as a number of entertainment games that have been successfully used for educational purposes. The EduGameLab project aims to stimulate the use of games in the classroom. This paper presents a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of game-based learning and focuses specifically on empirical evidence on the effectiveness of using games in education in the last decade. Moreover, the study focuses on usage in formalized school contexts, i.e. pre-school, elementary school, secondary school, high school and higher education. As secondary aims we also assess whether there are any clear methodological trends and whether a link could be found between the outcome of empirical studies and the evaluator being a stakeholder in the game development.

Defining Adaptation in a Generic Multi Layer Model: CAM: The GRAPPLE Conceptual Adaptation Model

Authoring of Adaptive Hypermedia is a difficult and time consuming task. Reference models like LAOS and AHAM separate adaptation and content in different layers. Systems like AHA!, offer graphical tools based on these models to allow authors to define adaptation without knowing any adaptation language. The adaptation that can be defined using such tools is still limited. Authoring systems like MOT are more flexible, but usability of adaptation specification is low. This paper proposes a more generic model, CAM, which allows the adaptation to be defined in an arbitrary number of layers, where adaptation is expressed in terms of relationships between concepts. This model allows the creation of more powerful yet easier to use graphical authoring tools.

Game engines selection framework for high-fidelity serious applications

Serious games represent the state-of-the-art in the convergence of electronic gaming technologies with instructional design principles and pedagogies. Despite the value of high-fidelity content in engaging learners and providing realistic training environments, building games which deliver high levels of visual and functional realism is a complex, time consuming and expensive process. Therefore, commercial game engines, which provide a development environment and resources to more rapidly create high-fidelity virtual worlds, are increasingly used for serious as well as for entertainment applications. Towards this intention, the authors propose a new framework for the selection of game engines for serious applications and sets out five elements for analysis of engines in order to create a benchmarking approach to the validation of game engine selection. Selection criteria for game engines and the choice of platform for Serious Games are substantially different from entertainment games, as Serious Games have very different objectives, emphases and technical requirements. In particular, the convergence of training simulators with serious games, made possible by increasing hardware rendering capacity is enabling the creation of high-fidelity serious games, which challenge existing instructional approaches. This paper overviews several game engines that are suitable for high-fidelity serious games, using the proposed framework.

Towards Understanding Learning Behavior Patterns in Social Adaptive Personalized E-Learning Systems

Implicit user modeling has always long since played an important role in supporting personalized web-based e-learning environments and is increasingly important in other learning environments such as serious games. Its main concern is to unobtrusively and ubiquitously learn from a learner’s previous experiences and characteristics, in order to adapt the services to their personal needs. An empirical investigation for understanding learning behavior patterns forms the basis for establishing stronger implicit user modeling mechanisms and this study aims to get a better insight into types of learning behavior. The proposed usage of data mining and visualization elicited some interesting learning behavior patterns . We analyzed these from two perspectives: action frequency and action sequences , based on an expert-designed classification of behavior patterns that helped rank the various action categories according to significance from a user’s perspective. The initial results of the study are promising and suggest possible directions for further improving implicit user modeling.

LAG 2.0: Refining a Reusable Adaptation Language and Improving on Its Authoring

Reusable adaptation specifications for adaptive behaviour has come to the forefront of adaptive research recently, with EU projects such as GRAPPLE1, and PhD research efforts on designing an adaptation language for learning style specification [1]. However, this was not the case five years ago, when an adaptation language for adaptive hypermedia (LAG) was first proposed. This paper describes the general lessons learnt during the last five years in designing, implementing and using an adaptation language, as well as the changes that the language has undergone in order to better fulfil its goal of combining a high level of semantics with simplicity, portability as well as being flexible . Besides discussing these changes based on some sample strategies, this paper also presents a novel authoring environment for the programming-savvy adaptation author, that applies feedback accumulated during various evaluation sessions with the previous set of tools, and its first evaluation with programming experts.

The herbert virtual museum

In recent years, virtual reality and augmented reality have emerged as areas of extreme interest as unique methods for visualising and interacting with digitalmuseum artefacts in a different context, for example, as a virtualmuseum or exhibition, particularly over the Internet. Modern cultural heritage exhibitions have evolved from static to dynamic exhibitions and challenging explorations. This paper presents two different applications developed for the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery that make the users experience more immersive, engaging, and interactive. The first application utilizes mobile phone devices in order to enrich the visitors experience in the museum, and the second application is a serious game for cultural heritage and in particular for museum environments focusing on the younger visitors.

Authoring adaptive educational hypermedia on the semantic desktop

Personalisation of information is a desired feature, but authoring and creation of adaptive hypermedia is a difficult endeavour. Especially, manual annotation is the bottleneck of such authoring. Thus it is vital to support the authoring process by reusing automatically generated metadata. Here, we show the integration of the generic AH authoring environment MOT into a semantic desktop environment, as well as its first small-scale evaluation. In this set-up, the semantic desktop environment provides the rich source of automatically generated metadata, while MOT allows enhancing this metadata manually, as needed for the authoring of an adaptive environment here, an adaptive course.

A Spiral Model for Adding Automatic, Adaptive Authoring to Adaptive Hypermedia

At present a large amount of research exists into the design and implementation of adaptive systems. However, not many target the complex task of authoring in such systems, or their evaluation. In order to tackle these problems, we have looked into the causes of the complexity. Manual annotation has proven to be a bottleneck for authoring of adaptive hypermedia. One such solution is the reuse of automatically generated metadata. In our previous work we have proposed the integration of the generic Adaptive Hypermedia authoring environment, MOT (My Online Teacher), and a semantic desktop environment, indexed by Beagle++. A prototype, Sesame2MOT Enricher v1, was built based upon this integration approach and evaluated. After the initial evaluations, a web-based prototype was built (web- based Sesame2MOT Enricher v2 application) and integrated in MOT v2, conforming with the findings of the first set of evaluations. This new prototype underwent another evaluation. This paper thus does a synthesis of the approach in general, the initial prototype, with its first evaluations, the improved prototype and the first results from the most recent evaluation round, following the next implementation cycle of the spiral model (Boehm, 88).

Continuous Use of Authoring for Adaptive Educational Hypermedia: A Long-term Case Study

Adaptive educational hypermedia allows lessons to be personalized according to the needs of the learner. However, to achieve this, content must be split into stand-alone fragments that can be processed by a course personalization engine. Authoring content for this process is still a difficult activity, and it is essential for the popularization of adaptive educational hypermedia that authoring is simplified, so that the various stakeholders in the educational process, students, teachers, administrators, etc. can easily work with such systems. Thus, real-world testing with these stakeholders is essential. In this paper we describe recent extensions and improvements we have implemented in the My Online Teacher MOT3.0 adaptation authoring tool set, based on an initial set of short-term evaluations, and then focus on describing a longterm usage and assessment of the system.

Adaptation Languages for Learning: The CAM Meta-model

Adaptive Hypermedia (AH) can offer a richer learning experience, tailored to students’ needs. However, authoring of AH is complex. Several models and systems have been developed. However the adaptation that can be defined, is limited in terms of(re)-usability by educational authors. To simplify adaptive behaviour authoring, the solution considered most intuitive [7] is a visual environment. In this paper we specify the design of a visual authoring tool. We describe the implications this visual aspect has for the adaptation languages. This reflects lessons learnt from the experience of authoring project partners of the EUGRAPPLE project, hence is of interest to any designer or developer of reusable, general purpose adaptive e-learning system.