Sustain City

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in interactive narrative-based serious games for education and training. A key challenge posed by educational serious games is the balance of fun and learning, so that players are motivated enough to unfold the narrative stories on their own pace while getting sufficient learning materials across. In this chapter, various design strategies that aim to tackle this challenge are presented through the development of Sustain City, an educational serious game system that engages students, particularly prospective and beginning science and engineering students, in a series of engineering design. Besides narrative-learning synthesis, supplementing the player's actions with feedback, and the development of a sufficient guidance system, the chapter also discusses the integration of rigorous assessment and personalized scaffolding. The evaluation of Sustain City deployment confirms the values of the serious games in promoting students' interests and learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

A Random Forest Model for Personalized Learning in a Narrative Game

“…Gridlock provides a solid starting point for the PING system because it has previously demonstrated success as an educational tool. Previous evaluations of the game had over 300 students in seven courses at Tennessee State and Rowan Universities 17 . Students were given evaluation tests before and after playing the game, and the results are shown in Figure 1 17 .…”

“…Previous evaluations of the game had over 300 students in seven courses at Tennessee State and Rowan Universities 17 . Students were given evaluation tests before and after playing the game, and the results are shown in Figure 1 17 . Treatment sections showed significant improvement over control sections.…”

“…Treatment sections showed significant improvement over control sections. Furthermore, students described the game as more interesting and engaging over a conventional problem-solving approach to learning 17 .…”

“…These types of games can be used to provide players with goal-focused features while simulating real-world problems. Much research has demonstrated that these educational narrative games can both support student cognitive development 12,13,14,15,16,17 and provide benefits in student assessment 18,19,20 .…”

Evaluation of an AI-assisted Adaptive Educational Game System

“…One possible environment for combining an ITS and PBL is in a narrative virtual game environment. Serious games (SGs) [8] provide an ideal environment to combine these systems and address issues such as student engagement, personalized student support [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], and even automated student assessment [15], [16], [17] without the need for instructor intervention.…”