Research Activities

Work package 2 summarises overall research activities of the project and actually includes the following sub work packages:

WP 2a Interactive and adaptive competence development

80Days endeavours to extend the existing (basically cognitive) state-of-the-art by motivational/emotional aspects, by connecting it with adaptive storytelling, and by the integration of dynamic processes of learning and navigation in the learning environment. The main objective of this work package is to establish cognitive and psycho-pedagogically inspired models and frameworks for intelligent and adaptive interventions (not exclusively) in educational games. Such theoretical framework allows the game to interpret the learner’s behaviour within the virtual environment in terms of his/her knowledge, learning progress, motivational/emotional state and provide him/her with a combination of suitable educational interventions, learning situation, gaming activities, and story elements. The term suitable refers to providing didactically smart learning challenges, exercises, or guidance/hints as well as to retaining motivation, curiosity, and fun. Therefore, this work package will elaborate and formalize implementable cognitive models of adaptation in order to enable the system (the game demonstrators) to adequately respond to learner requirements constituted by cognitive aspects, motivational/emotional aspects, narrative aspects, and dynamic components of learning and gaming activities (e.g., navigating and combing through the virtual environment). As a result, 80Days will deliver a dynamic 3-component framework for adaptive interventions as well as probabilistic knowledge assessment.

WP 2b Interactive and adaptive digital storytelling

Interactive and adaptive digital storytelling in educational games basically serves two purposes. While micro-adaptive interventions (either educational or motivational/emotional) occur within a learning situation and therefore do not influence the storyline of the game, macro-adaptive interventions influence the storyline and in connection also the ambience and pace. In the context of adaptivity and personalization, the system must be able to perform such adaptation linked to knowledge, learning progress, motivational/emotional state, and individual preferences. The second purpose is to serve the re-usability of learning material by enabling the realization of different stories and even entirely different games (also for a variety of different learning domains) on the basis of more or less the same pool of story units, patterns, and structures as well as learning and gaming concepts and assets. Thus, the objectives of this work package are analysing, extending, and formalizing existing theories of interactive and adaptive digital storytelling, and adjusting them to the requirements of DEGs. In addition, an appropriate description format and an object-oriented model for atomic story elements will be developed, which transform the theoretical work into application. A central part of the adaptive capabilities of the system (the game demonstrators) will be a narration engine that drives the characteristics and scripts of the storyline and that interacts with game and adaptive engines. Finally, a story editor will be developed, a software tool that allows creating, annotating, and managing story elements.

WP 2c Micro and macro-adaptive technology

This work package is tasked with performing applied research and development in the area of intelligent and adaptive educational technologies towards facilitating micro and macro-adaptivity in personalised educational systems, particularly DEGs. This leads to three concrete, but related, high level objectives

Enabling external, educationally aware, adaptive services to make macro level adaptive decisions and apply them to the game engine without adversely impacting the narrative of the system
Enabling external, again educationally aware, adaptive services to make micro level adaptive influences to modify learning situations to tailor towards learner specific needs, preferences and goals.
Developing a paradigm of cooperation to ensure micro and macro level adaptations are pedagogically consistent and appropriate

The tasks in this work package will develop methodologies and technologies to support these objectives.

One of the main aims of this work package (WP2c) is to produce a technical implementation of the theoretical research produced in both WP2a and WP2c. These work packages purse the same goals, however while WP2a focuses on the human component (i.e., cognitive/psychological aspects), WP2c focuses on the technological aspects.

WP 2d Learning resource integration

The upfront objective of research on learning resource integration is to establish a general methodology to integrate existing (learning) resources into an immersive DEG. As the scenarios and learning objectives of the envisioned game demonstrator, this work mainly (but not exclusively) focuses on geography. Attractive, informative and comparable maps (topographic and thematic maps) as well as map-related representations (e.g., satellite images, aerial images, ortho-photos, panoramas, and block screens) are the most important mediums for geographic information transfer. Such data must be carefully prepared and harmonized, especially in highly interactive and adaptive environments. The main didactic objective of learning resource integration is to support a non-linear information transmission by thematic or spatial orientation. Important complementary resources that have to be integrated are, for example, existing learning media, websites, web services, 3D material, or mentioned cartographic material. An integration of such material requires working it up for different learners of different ages, with different abilities, needs, or preferences. Moreover, integration requires a methodology to involve social, para-social, and cultural aspects. This WP will deliver a methodology and operational work of analyzing and selecting relevant/appropriate (learning) resources, to harmonize and symbolize resources as basis for their implementation, and a (limited) generalization of geography/cartography-centred methods to universal resources, limited to technological characteristics instead of subject matter aspects.