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
[email protected]; [email protected];
[email protected]
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.
Educational games’ drawbacks
 Complicated design and creation of educational VRgames 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.
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.
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.
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.
VR-MultiAuthor Operation
 Operates at two levels, the authoring level and the game
level.
 Authoring level: human instructors provide the domainknowledge 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.
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.
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
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 player’s 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.
Game Level: The VR-Environment
Game Level: The VR-Environment
Game Level: Question’s 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.
Game Level: Answer’s 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 player’s long-term
model.
Domain-Independent vs DomainDependent 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 player’s
level of game playing skill.
 There are also other domain-independent player features, such
as the player’s proneness in making typing mistakes, spelling
mistakes, etc.
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.
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.
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.
Interaction of domain-dependent and
domain-independent parts of player
models
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 VRMulti-Author and the results revealed that the instructors
were quite happy authoring in the environment.
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.
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.
Conclusions
 In this paper we presented VR-MultiAuthor, a knowledgebased 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 player’s ability to play the game itself and a
player’s 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.