An Assessment Engine: Educators As Editors Of Their Serious Games' Assessment

Serious Games (SG) are increasingly used by educators to assist the teaching and learning process and offer many advantages over traditional education. They are highly engaging, motivating and they have the potential to adapt to each student quickly becoming an ideal supplementary tool for education. However, if the majority of teachers agree that using SGs increases the motivation, learning and retention of their students, very few of them are ready to trust their assessment to verify that the learning goals have been met. They would rather adopt a more conventional method such as a paper-based test. We believe two main reasons explain this attitude: a lack of ownership over the games used and the rigidness of the games, making them unmodifiable by the teacher. To overcome these issues, we have developed an assessment engine to be used by both SG developers and educators. The engine's design results in a separation of a game and its assessment, and the resulting modularity allows the teachers to modify the assessment of a game even after distribution. This paper focuses on the teacher interface of the assessment engine. After reviewing the literature associated with ingame assessment and learning analytics, the paper will provide a summary of the engine and its functionalities, present the Learning Analytics (LA) dashboard. We will then describe the visual language that allows teachers to edit a game's assessment system based on the LA reports. Thereafter, the authorisation and versioning mechanics of the engine will be detailed, showing how the system regulates the access to the games and stressing the fact that every teacher will have, after modification, a unique game customised to their students' needs. Finally, we will provide conclusions and state the remaining work to be undertaken.