Summary

Serious games are becoming an effective tool for pedagogy and learning in general. In this domain, one of the questions we are interested in is how to assess a player’s learning progress. Player assessment can provide teachers and students with formative and summative information about learning progress. Data from the player assessment can be used to dynamically adjust game mechanics which in turn improves the learning experience. We introduce the Adaptation and Assessment (TwoA) component, an opensource library that offers automated game difficulty adaptation and a player’s learning assessment. TwoA is being developed within the RAGE project, an EU’s initiative for supplying serious game developers with portable and reusable open-source software components providing pedagogical utility. In TwoA, we implemented a modified version of the Computerized Adaptive Practice algorithm for game difficulty and player skill assessments and a real-time adaptation of the game difficulty to the player skill. The CAP algorithm offers many benefits. First, it was extensively validated in many studies involving human players. Second, it was specifically designed for serious games to assess and match game difficulty to player skill to promote learning. It is a major distinction from existing matchmaking algorithms, such as TrueSkill or variations of Elo, that are aimed at competitive matching of two human players. Finally, the CAP algorithm is not proprietary. TwoA’s version of the algorithm provides two main benefits over the original CAP algorithm. First, we describe and validate improvements to CAP’s real-time adaptation of game difficulty. Second, TwoA adopts a RAGE-client architecture making the TwoA component easy to integrate and use with game development platforms.

Goals

• Learn why difficulty adaptation is important in serious games.
• Learn how to use the Adaptation and Assessment (TwoA) component.
• Learn about the limitations of the relative assessment techniques.

Target audience

• Game developers
• Students on TEL, DGBL, and game development