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

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 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.

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 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.

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: 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 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 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 VR- Multi-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 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 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 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.