Use of Cloud Gaming in Education

Abstract

The use of digital games in education has been the subject of research for many years and their usefulness has been confirmed by many studies and research projects. Standardized tests, such as PISA test, show that respondents achieved better reading, math and physics results if they used the computer more for gaming-related activities. It has been proven that the application of video games in education increases student motivation, improves several types of key skillssocial and intellectual skills, reflexes and concentration. Nevertheless, there are several challenges associated with the application of video games in schools and they can be categorized as technical (network and end device limitations), competency (teachers' knowledge in the area), qualitative (lack of educational games of high quality), and financial (high cost of purchasing games and equipment). The novel architecture for delivery of gaming content commonly referred to as "cloud gaming" has the potential to solve most of the present challenges of using games in education. A well-designed cloud gaming platform would enable seamless and simple usage for both students and teachers. While solving most of the present problems, cloud gaming introduces a set of new research challenges which will be discussed in this section.

An Overview of the Networking Issues of Cloud Gaming

“…Overall, 23 pieces of literature were selected to identify issues and challenges related to networking that currently affect cloud gaming. The identified issues and challenges are quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) [17]- [21], latency [20], [22]- [30], bandwidth [20], [24], [26], [27], [31]- [33], delay [17], [23], [27], [31], [34]- [39], packet loss [17], [19], [22], [30], the cost of providing the service [31]- [33], complexity (video encoding, compression, and game content) [20], [34], [36], [38], and graphics quality [23], [34]- [36]. Figure 2 presents these issues and challenges along with the number of corresponding literature mainly cited to discuss them.…”

“…If a game has high latency, it may feel unresponsive [20]. In general, Sužnjević and Homen [22] stated that cloud gaming systems would require a Round Trip Time (RTT) network latency of less than 70ms. However, the latency may depend on the type of game genre.…”

“…When network congestion occurs and the queue size is reached, packet loss occurs [17]. As an effect, cloud-based games become unplayable with a packet loss of 1% [19], [22]. Thus, packet loss is a challenge to the creation of a user-friendly cloud-based game since it may cause decoding errors depending on the type of packets lost [30].…”