Introduction: Intelligent Learning Assessment in Serious Games

There is a consensus that Serious Games (SGs) have a potential as a tool for education, and the conversation is no longer about whether it makes sense to use SGs in education, but how to exploit their potential to become a revolution is to become effective in the evaluation of the learning progress of the player. The aim of this special issue is to presents some recent in the field of assessment of learning

Assessment in and of serious games: an overview

There is a consensus that serious games have a significant potential as a tool for instruction. However, their effectiveness in terms of learning outcomes is still understudied mainly due to the complexity involved in assessing intangible measures. A systematic approach—based on established principles and guidelines—is necessary to enhance the design of serious games, and many studies lack a rigorous assessment. An important aspect in the evaluation of serious games, like other educational tools, is user performance assessment. This is an important area of exploration because serious games are intended to evaluate the learning progress as well as the outcomes. This also emphasizes the importance of providing appropriate feedback to the player. Moreover, performance assessment enables adaptivity and personalization to meet individual needs in various aspects, such as learning styles, information provision rates, feedback, and so forth. This paper first reviews related literature regarding the educational effectiveness of serious games. It then discusses how to assess the learning impact of serious games and methods for competence and skill assessment. Finally, it suggests two major directions for future research: characterization of the player's activity and better integration of assessment in games

Affordance segmentation of hand-occluded containers from exocentric images

Visual affordance segmentation identifies the surfaces of an object an agent can interact with. Common challenges for the identification of affordances are the variety of the geometry and physical properties of these surfaces as well as occlusions. In this paper, we focus on occlusions of an object that is hand-held by a person manipulating it. To address this challenge, we propose an affordance segmentation model that uses auxiliary branches to process the object and hand regions separately. The proposed model learns affordance features under hand-occlusion by weighting the feature map through hand and object segmentation. To train the model, we annotated the visual affordances of an existing dataset with mixed-reality images of hand-held containers in third-person (exocentric) images. Experiments on both real and mixed-reality images show that our model achieves better affordance segmentation and generalisation than existing models.Comment: Paper accepted to Workshop on Assistive Computer Vision and Robotics (ACVR) in International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2023; 10 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. Data, code, and trained models are available at https://apicis.github.io/projects/acanet.htm

Serious Games for education and training

Serious Games (SGs) are gaining an ever increasing interest for education and traning. Exploiting the latest simulation and visualization technologies, SGs are able to contextualize the player's experience in challenging, realistic environments, supporting situated cognition. However, we still miss methods and tools for effectively and deeply infusing pedagogy and instruction inside digital games. After presenting an overview of the state of the art of the SG taxonomies, the paper introduces the pedagogical theories and models most relevant to SGs and their implications on SG design. We also present a schema for a proper integration of games in education, supporting different goals in different steps of a formal education process. By analyzing a set of well-established SGs and formats, the paper presents the main mechanics and models that are being used in SG designs, with a particular focus on assessment, feedback and learning analytics. An overview of tools and models for SG design is also presented. Finally, based on the performed analysis, indications for future research in the field are provided

Assessment of Driver Behavior Based on Machine Learning Approaches in a Social Gaming Scenario

The estimation of user performance analytics in the area of car driver performance was carried out in this paper. The main focus relies on the descriptive analysis with our approaches emphasizing on educational serious games, in order to improvise the driver\u2019s behavior (specifically green driving) in a pleasant and challenging way. We also propose a general Internet of the Things (IoT) social gaming platform (SGP) concept that could be adaptable and deployable to any kind of application domain. The social gaming scenario in this application enables the users to compete with peers based on their physical location. The efficient drivers will be awarded with virtual coins and gained virtual coins can be used in real world applications (such as purchasing travel tickets, reservation of parking lots, etc.). This research work is part of TEAM project co-funded within the EU FP7 ICT research program

GALA Dissemination Report 2, Deliverable 9.6

Westera, W., Berta, R., Moreno-Ger, P., Bellotti, F., Nadolski, R., Moore, P., Boyle, L., Beligan, D., & Baalsrud Hauge, J. (2012). GALA Dissemination Report 2, Deliverable D9.6 of the GALA Network of Excellence on Serious Gaming. Heerlen, The Netherlands: Open Universiteit.This report summarises the activities and outcomes of WP09 during the second year of the GALA project.GALA-projec

A serious game architecture for green mobility

Good driving behavior is a significant factor for road safety and green mobility. A countermeasure to overcome the coarse driving behavior and a methodology to captivate optimal driving traits are discussed in this work. For which, the serious games concept was exploited to improvise the driver performance by deploying diversified game logics (scores, incentives and live game for performance evolution) on a smartphone-based user interface. The application was tested in ASTA ZERO (Active Safety Test Area) in Sweden. The tests comprised of variations (good and bad driving behavior) in driving pattern for analyzing the impact of the application on the driver performance

GALA brand and resources transfer plan

During Year 3, the Serious Games Society (SGS) started its public activities and it is poised to be one of the main legacies of the GALA project. In its attempt to gather researchers, the SGS was born with its own websites and social media outlets (a Twitter account, a Facebook page, etc.). As Year 4 represents the transition from the network (GALA) towards the future (SGS), WP9 will perform a brand transition across the web media involved, moving from the former GALA-branded accounts towards more the more sustainable SGS-branded accounts. This document describes the plan to perform this transition, indicating the action points to be taken in each of our existing media components.Co-funded by the FP7 programme of the European Commission: GALA projec

Deliverable 9.7 - GALA Dissemination Report 3

Westera, W., Berta, R., Moreno-Ger, P., Bellotti, F., Nadolski, R., Padrón-Nápoles, C. L., Boyle, L., Beligan, D., & Baalsrud Hauge, J. (2013). Deliverable 9.7 - GALA Dissemination Report 3. Heerlen, The Netherlands: Games and Learning Alliance, European Network of Excellence.This report summarizes the dissemination activities of the GALA Network of Excellence from October 2012 till October 2013.7th Framework Programme of the European Commissio