Virtual Reality edutainment: costeffective development of personalised software applications

1
Virtual Reality edutainment cost-effective
development of personalised software applications
Maria Virvou, Konstantinos Manos George
Katsionis
Department of Informatics University of
Piraeus Piraeus 18534, Greece
mvirvou_at_unipi.gr konstantinos_at_kman.gr
gkatsion_at_kman.gr
2
Educational games

• The attractiveness of software games has often
  been considered very useful for the creation of
  attractive educational software.
• Many researchers have developed projects towards
  the development of software games for education
  that aim at increasing the students motivation
  and engagement while they learn.
• Edutainment is meant to combine entertainment
  with education. However, these educational games
  introduced in classrooms may create additional
  problems in the learning process.

3
Educational games drawbacks

• Complicated design and creation of educational
  VR-games for multiple teaching domains.
• Computer games that are introduced in classrooms
  might cause problems to some students instead of
  help them in their learning process.
• There is a difference at the level of expertise
  on software game playing among children.
• There is a need for underlying reasoning
  mechanisms in the educational games that may
  ensure individualised interaction.

4
Problem Learning due to edutainment (not
related to the school lesson)

• As pointed out in (Yacci et al. 2004),
  edutainment environments that include educational
  games, demand a certain amount of effort and
  learning that is not related to the instructional
  goals of the school lesson that is taught
• 1) Operations refer to the legal movements
  and actions that a player can make inside the
  game.
• 2) Strategy learning refers to the overall
  plot or mission of the game.
• 3) Instructional Goals and Outcomes refer to
  educational goals and outcomes that have value
  beyond the game itself. In the case of VR-ENGAGE
  the classification of usability characteristics
  has to take place in relation to the 3D virtual
  reality environment of the game, which adds
  complexity to the user interface on top of the
  operations, and strategies of game playing.

5
ITSs and Educational games

• The technology of Intelligent Tutoring Systems
  may provide such reasoning mechanisms.
• Student modelling, has became a core or even
  defining issue for the field of ITSs.
• Thus combining ITSs with virtual reality games
  can render educational applications both highly
  adaptive to students needs and attractive for
  them.
• In this paper, a knowledge-based authoring tool
  that can provide ITSs which operate as VR
  adventure games, is discussed.

6
VR-MultiAuthor

• Authoring environment for instructors who wish to
  create ITSs that operate through a VR- game.
• Targeted audience school children of elementary
  school or secondary school.
• Provide individualised instruction that takes
  into account individual characteristics of
  students
• level and quality of knowledge of the domain
  being taught
• game playing skills that may affect their
  learning
• Student models include domain-independent
  characteristics of players such as their level of
  game-playing competence on top of
  domain-dependent characteristics such as the
  level of knowledge of a student in a particular
  domain.

7
VR-MultiAuthor Operation

• Operates at two levels, the authoring level and
  the game level.
• Authoring level human instructors provide the
  domain-knowledge of their courses and create
  their own personalised educational games.
• Game level the created personalised educational
  games are used by students who can learn while
  playing.

8
Authoring Level

• The initial input to VR-Multi-Author consists of
  domain knowledge concerning the topic to be
  taught, given by the human instructor.
• The domain knowledge consists of a description of
  key concepts of the domain, lessons and tests.
  The domain has to be described in terms of
  hierarchies, which constitute the knowledge
  representation of HPR.
• Then the author inserts facts that s/he wishes to
  be taught to students and which are relevant to
  the main concepts of the hierarchies.
• Finally, VR-Multi-Author constructs tests that
  consist of questions relating to the factual
  knowledge of the domain.

9
Game Level Virtual Reality Game

• A highly interactive Virtual Reality Game.
  Similar to many commercial adventure games.
• The ultimate goal of a student-player, is to
  navigate through a virtual world and climb up the
  mountain of knowledge. In the virtual world he
• Finds agents that guide him
• Objects (keys, maps, hints) to help him
• Guards and doors bearing riddles to be solved

10
Game Level Parts of Virtual Reality Game
Interface

• Inventory- list At times a player is given a key
  as a bonus, in which case s/he will not have to
  answer a question to get through a guarded door.
  In such cases the bonus-key is kept in the
  players inventory list to be used by the player
  in a difficult situation where s/he does not know
  an answer posed to him/her by a dragon.
• Tutor-hints As part of the adventure of the game
  the player may also come across certain objects
  where s/he may click on. These objects appear at
  random and give hints to students or guide them
  to read another part of the domain being taught.
  However, these hints or the parts of the theory
  that are visited, are not immediately usable by
  the students, since they refer to questions that
  the students will have to answer at a future
  location of the virtual world.
• Maps The student may find his/her way in the
  labyrinth by using the maps which may be
  activated when the student needs them.

11
Game Level The VR-Environment
12
Game Level The VR-Environment
13
Game Level Questions Interaction

• A guard dragon poses a question to the player
  from a specific domain.
• If the student player gives a correct answer then
  s/he receives full points for this question and
  the dragon allows the student to continue his/her
  way through the door.
• If the answer is not correct then the system
  performs error diagnosis so that it can find out
  the cause of the error.

14
Game Level Answers Evaluation

• A student may give an erroneous answer due to a
  typing or spelling error. Then the error is
  considered superficial and the player receives
  some marks.
• If a player types a totally irrelevant answer
  then this is considered a serious error and the
  player does not receive any marks at all.
• If there is an ambiguity as to what the
  underlying cause of an error has been, the system
  consults the players long-term model.

15
Domain-Independent vs Domain-Dependent Player
Modelling

• Domain-dependent features concern the students
  level of knowledge in the particular domain being
  taught. These features include error categories
  or lack of knowledge for specific domains.
• Domain-independent features mainly concern the
  players level of game playing skill.
• There are also other domain-independent player
  features, such as the players proneness in
  making typing mistakes, spelling mistakes, etc.

16
Playing skill User Interface Acquaintance

• Level of understanding of the User Interface
• It shows whether the player
• Knows concepts like Inventory, Tutor-hint,
  etc.
• Knows how to use facilities like the Map
• Understands the basic functionality of a Virtual
  Environment
• The way a student used or not used the
  functionality that the game provided, revealed us
  how acquainted he/she is with similar games.

17
Playing skill Navigational effort

• This feature shows how well the student can
  navigate through the Virtual World
• We measure the frequency of actions
• Bumping into walls
• Aimless rotation around the same spot
• Aimless clicks inside the environment
• You can not expect all students to know how to
  play a Virtual Reality Game.

18
Playing skill VR Environment Distractions

• Many times student seemed to be overtaken by the
  Virtual Environment, forgetting the real purpose
  of the game.
• It is very difficult to discern between actual
  distraction and navigational problems or low UI
  Acquaintance levels.

19
Interaction of domain-dependent and
domain-independent parts of player models
20
Evaluation Authoring

• The authoring tool was given to four human
  teachers that taught history, biology, spelling
  and mathematics respectively to the same grade of
  a school.
• They had been given a short training concerning
  the use of the tool.
• The human teachers created their lessons quite
  easily.
• The instructors were interviewed about the use of
  VR-Multi-Author and the results revealed that the
  instructors were quite happy authoring in the
  environment.

21
Evaluation Playing

• The experiment involved a class of 16 school
  children of 11-12 years old and the four human
  teachers.
• After the children finished using the programs,
  their and errors that were collected in their
  user protocols, were given to their school
  teachers.
• The teachers were asked to repeat the questions
  where students had originally given erroneous
  answers.This would reveal the degree to which
  students had learnt from their mistakes while
  they used the software.

22
Evaluation Playing

• The players of the educational games remembered
  the correct answers to a high extent.
• The educational games had achieved their aim of
  being educationally effective as well as
  entertaining.
• The players of the educational games were
  fascinated and enthusiastic by the idea of a game
  in the classroom.

23
Conclusions

• In this paper we presented VR-MultiAuthor, a
  knowledge-based authoring tool for Intelligent
  Tutoring Systems that operate as virtual reality
  computer games, and focused on its player
  modelling capabilities.
• An educational game, has to have the ability to
  distinguish between a players ability to play
  the game itself and a players level of knowledge
  in the particular domain being taught.
• Players who are not familiar with the user
  interfaces of games should be given extra help in
  this respect.