Michael Christel - Adaptive Learning and Teacher Resources for Educational Games
Presenter: Michael Christel, Teaching Professor, Carnegie Mellon ETC
Through DARPA’s ENGAGE program, the Entertainment Technology Center developed a game, PuppyBot Rescue, that teaches proportional reasoning to children in a broad age range of 5-11, but with a more core range of 6-9. The game centers on the task of balancing a beam). We incorporate adaptive learning so that for players who are quite successful, the game remains challenging and interesting by proceeding quicker to more advanced problem levels. For children who are experiencing failure, the game moves more slowly through problem levels. Our design was guided by the work of Csikszentmihalyi and by the various game lenses espoused by Jesse Schell in his Art of Game Design book. For struggling players, we offer gentle scaffolding help and on repeated failures more detailed precise help to work through problem levels as needed. The adaptive progression though problem levels and the use of scaffolding are also recorded in the game logs, enabling us to study different types of adaptive and scaffolding strategies. Teacher resources are included in through a web site, including a themed interactive page where teachers can set up and discuss their own problems using the same artwork as the game to fully tailor lessons for their own class needs.
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