A Software Platform for Educational Board Games

Educational games such as quizzes, quests, puzzles, mazes and logical problems may be modeled as multimedia board games. In the scope of the ADOPTA project1 being under development at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at Sofia University, a formal model for presentation of such educational board games was invented and elaborated. Educational games can be modeled as special board mini-games, with a board of any form and any types of positions. Over defined positions, figures (objects) with certain properties are placed and, next, there are to be defined formal rules for manipulation of these figures and resulted effects. The model has been found to be general enough in order to allow description and execution control of more complex logical problems to be solved by several actions delivered to/by the player according some formal rules and context conditions and, in general, of any learning activities and their workflow. It is used as a base for creation of a software platform providing facilities for easy construction of multimedia board games and their execution. The platform consists of game designer (i.e., a game authoring tool) and game run-time controller communicating each other through game repository. There are created and modeled many examples of educational board games appropriate for didactic purposes, self evaluations, etc., which are supposed to be designed easily by authors with no IT skills and experience. By means of game metadata descriptions, these games are going be included into narrative storyboards and, next, delivered to learners with appropriate profile according their learning style, preferences, etc. Moreover, usage of artificial intelligence agents is planned as well – once as playing virtual opponents of the player or, otherwise, being virtual advisers of the gamer helping him/her in finding the right problem solution within given domain such as discovering a treasure using a location map, finding best tour in a virtual museum, guessing an unknown word in a hangman game, and many others

Modern Trends in the Automatic Generation of Content for Video Games

Attractive and realistic content has always played a crucial role in the penetration and popularity of digital games, virtual environments, and other multimedia applications. Procedural content generation enables the automatization of production of any type of game content including not only landscapes and narratives but also game mechanics and generation of whole games. The article offers a comparative analysis of the approaches to automatic generation of content for video games proposed in last five years. It suggests a new typology of the use of procedurally generated game content comprising of categories structured in three groups: content nature, generation process, and game dependence. Together with two other taxonomies – one of content type and the other of methods for content generation – this typology is used for comparing and discussing some specific approaches to procedural content generation in three promising research directions based on applying personalization and adaptation, descriptive languages, and semantic specifications

Towards automatic construction of adaptable courseware storyboards

In last twenty years, researchers have conducted intensive research in the area of principal models, software architectures and practical system development of adaptive e-learning platforms. Brains are fascinated by great opportunities for radical improvement of the teaching process by means of applying adaptability at different levels. There are two general issues of adaptive e-learning – enabling different educational content delivered to different individuals or groups and, as well, differently formed sequencing and presentation of that content delivery. This paper presents two approaches for creating and delivering training courses adaptable to learners with different learning styles. The first one is implemented within a platform for building edutainment (education plus entertainment) services called ADOPTA (ADaptive technOlogy-enhanced Platform for eduTAinment). By means of ADOPTA, e-learning courses can be created manually by an instructor as directed storyboard graphs. Another feasible approach is to generate them automatically on-the-fly by the adaptive engine. The article discusses advantages and drawbacks of these two approaches for adaptive e-learning course constructio

Question and test interoperability – organization, reuse and

One of the modern trends in nowadays e-learning technologies and system development is toward creation of standards-based distributed computing applications. The presented paper examines ways of creation, organization, packaging, storage management and usage of e-learning courseware, regarding these modern elearning standards and technologies. It puts a special accent towards development and management of assessment contents. After a short overview and comparison of the standards and ways of their application, the article classifies LMS and platforms regarding their interoperability facilities, namely exchange of shareable and packaged learning contents, especially for testing. Here, we analyze as well important characters of system interoperability and propose a detailed classification and notation. Finally, as a case study, we describe our framework based on the recent IMS standards and developed within the ARCADE (Architecture for Reusable Courseware Authoring and DElivery) e-learning platform, and show directions for improving its interoperability abilities with other standard-based LMS. Special attention is put onto creation of an authoring tool for creating packaged and sharable assessments contents

Middleware Service Support for Modern Application Presentations

Nowadays, with steadily increasing number of various markup languages and their dialects, application developers need more often to rewrite the presentation in order to support more client devices. Java programmers using JSP for dynamic generation of the presentation layer have to create for given content different Java Server Pages (JSP)´s for showing it in different HTTP, WAP and Palm client. Instead of rewriting the same JSP several times, authors demonstrate an approach of separation of content and presentation form, by means of XSLT transformation over XML content. The client device type is detected by a server-side detector, which uses the type for choosing the correct XSLT for the correspondent XML content generated by a JSP. Moreover, for non-XML browsers, the detector invokes a transformer, which generates on-the-fly any-ML presentation using both the XML and XSLT

Testing software based on design by contract

In the last decade, several proposals have been done for construction of aspectoriented system for testing software products. The article presents results from design and development of a new aspect-oriented system for testing software created in Java 5 as an open source project named CodeContract, by using Design by Contract methodology. The system provides means of describing contracts and conditions during the design of software systems that should be satisfied during the system work process. Various conditions used in the contracts are able to be defined by means of preconditions, post-conditions and invariants. In order to describe these conditions in contracts, Java annotations are used. When using the Code- Contract system, contracts should be created during the development of software application. Then runtime checks of contracts are executed during the testing of the software applicatio

Adaptive courseware design based on learner character

During last decade, a great advance has been done in both theoretical research and software construction of Adaptive Hypermedia Systems (AHS). The article discusses the practical approach taken for authoring and instructional design of adaptive courseware based on learner character, namely learner goals and preferences, learner style, and learner performance and satisfaction level. This approach is adopted at pilot test of ADOPTA - adaptive technology-enhanced platform for edutainment. The authoring process relies strongly on an enhanced learning object metadata support, where learning styles are used for adaptive navigation within the narrative storyboard graph. On other side, both learner knowledge and satisfaction level determine adaptive content selection

Modeling educational quizzes as board games

In last decades, online computer games are used for e-learning purposes with significant success which determines steadily increasing interest in game development. Board games are special group of computer games where figures are manipulated on a surface according predefined rules. The paper presents a new, formalized model of traditional quizzes, puzzles and quests as multimedia board games created for facilitating the construction process of games of such types. By several examples authors show the model is quite general in order to support not only quiz, puzzle and quest presentation but also any instructional set of teaching activities presented as a race game. An adaptive game control strategy is proposed where dices are used for random selection of complexity of next questions. The model is going to be used as a basic paradigm for construction of a software platform for multimedia game development for adaptive education

Management of storyboard graphs for adaptive courseware construction

Adaptive e-learning systems try to improve teaching processes on Internet by providing different educational content and activities for different learners. Modern tendencies of adaptation require usage of learning styles on student grouping. Main idea of adaptive e-learning applications is to use a different pedagogical approach for each of these groups. This paper presents a software module called instructor tool for creating training courses suitable for learners with different learning styles. This module is a part of a platform for building edutainment (education plus entertainment) services called ADOPTA (ADaptive technOlogy-enhanced Platform for eduTAinment). E-learning courses within the tool are presented by directed storyboard graphs. The course instructor can create and edit their graphs and pages by a user-friendly visual interface. Our article is aimed primarily at description of the graph management which is behind the visual presentation and specially at discovering working paths within these graphs