Developing a vision and integrating it into a process architecture
In order to realize the results of interdisciplinary research efforts and outcomes, 80Days will utilize state-of-the-art psycho-pedagogical design, game design, and game development, implementing competitive technology. This will result in attractive examples of an entirely new horizon of DEGs. The baseline architecture for 80Days’s DEG technology integrates game technology (i.e., the game engine and its sub-components like character engine, physics engine, etc.) with an adaptive engine (which drives assessment as well as psycho-pedagogical interventions and game engine behavior) and a narration engine (which interacts with the adaptive engine and drives narrative style and progress). Those three “core engines” retrieve information and rules from an ontological backbone including educational, narrative, and learning resource descriptions.
Supporting the development lifecycle and measuring success
Evaluation of educational digital games addresses the pragmatic aspect (e.g., learning effectiveness and efficiency) but also the hedonic aspect (i.e., experience, affect and emotion) of gamer-software interaction. The former involves measuring learning success and conventional usability evaluation methods whereas the latter entails augmenting existing methods and creating alternative ones. In the recent years research interests and efforts on game evaluation have grown, exploring how to define, operationalize and measure user experience attributes such as pleasure, flow, fun, playability, and aesthetics. Nevertheless, given incoherent understanding of user experience and immature methodologies for analyzing it, it is hard to know how to select appropriate methods and tools to evaluate diverse interaction techniques and input/output modalities being employed in ever-evolving game designs. In the context of the project 80Days, we will identify the strengths and limitations of existing methods for evaluating the usability of digital games, thereby gaining insights for developing new methods.
Our goals
identify the relevant user experience attributes in digital educational games and develop robust theory-informed methods to measure them, both quantitatively and qualitatively,
to derive solid evaluation plans and criteria from different stakeholders’ multiple goals or values (personal, social and economic), which are to be fulfilled by the gaming environment,
to contribute to the development of a generic framework that enables the selection of methods appropriate for evaluating various interaction concepts, techniques and modalities in games, and
to address issues pertaining to the interplay between usability evaluation outcomes and system redesigns, optimizing cost-effectively the impact of evaluation. These activities will simultaneously contribute the evaluation and validation of 80Days “tangible” outcomes.
