Dynamically Adjusting Digital Educational Games Towards Learning Objectives

Abstract

PUBLISHED

Danish School of Education Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark

Personalization techniques offer the possibility to tailor each learner?s experience of a
 Digital Educational Game (DEG) to their specific needs. Such personalizations can adapt the
 challenge and difficulty of the DEG to the learner?s cognitive ability, motivation and gaming abilities. In
 particular, complex story based DEGs have introduced micro adaptive approaches, in which the
 adaptivity is applied in specific learning situations that do not usually affect the overall story line of the
 game. For adaptivity to be applied across an entire story based DEG, macro level adaptivity, such as
 learning situation sequencing, needs to be addressed. Such adaptivity can provide the means to
 dynamically adjust a DEG towards learning objectives based on the learner?s evolving needs, whilst
 monitoring and adapting to the learners motivation. For this the applied adaptations need to consider
 a holistic view by encompassing different dimensions within DEGs, such as learning, game play and
 narrative. This can be achieved by allowing the underlying storyline of a game to dynamically grow
 based on micro adaptive decisions made in specific learning situations with the goal to ensure an
 exciting and meaningful gaming experience for the learner. Finally any approach to adaptivity in DEG
 needs to assist reusability and general applicability in order to allow low cost and timely development.
 This paper introduces an approach to producing adaptive story based DEGs that incorporate best
 practice in reusable personalization techniques in e-Learning with adaptive storytelling for games. For
 this the concepts of micro and macro adaptivity are introduced as a means of addressing the
 challenges associated with applying personalization in story based DEGs. Furthermore the usage,
 implementation and evaluation of such dynamic personalizations is detailed. Finally the challenges of
 dynamic adjustment of DEGs towards learning objectives is illustrated based on two full-featured
 demonstrators that have been produced as part of the European Commission funded research project
 80Days.

The research and development introduced in this work is funded by the European Commission under
 the seventh framework program in the ICT research priority, contract number 215918 (80Days,
 www.eightydays.eu).