Abstract
Student reflection has been shown to be important for learning in educational domains. In this study, we embedded a student reflection task into a video game to diagnose how players were constructing new knowledge. The game took place in a space station in which odd things had been happening. In order to secure a position on the space station, players had to improve their decision making and solve the mystery. As part of the game narrative, players reflected on each learning opportunity or mini-game by providing hints for future players at the end of each round. A corpus of 674 hints from 41 players, playing a 60-min version of the game were coded independently by two coders. Coding covered four levels of understanding in the hints and ranged from a simple restatement of information to a deeper reflection that integrated ideas and created new knowledge. Analyzing hints provided an in-game learning measure that may complement other measures and a way to understand game play experience that did not interrupt game flow. This study provides some recommendations for the design of embedding user hints into video games.
Keywords
- Self-explanation
- Adaptive learning environment
- Video games
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Acknowledgement
This work is part of a larger team effort in which the Virtual Heroes Division of ARA developed the serious game, and Georgia Technology Research Institute developed the intelligent tutoring system embedded in the game. We would like to thank our sponsor. This research was supported by Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) via Air Force Research Laboratory Contract #FA8650-11-C-7177 to ARA, Inc. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon. Disclaimer: The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of IARPA, AFRL, or the U.S. Government.
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Veinott, E.S., Whitaker, E. (2019). Leaving Hints: Using Player In-Game Hints to Measure and Improve Learning. In: Stephanidis, C., Antona, M. (eds) HCI International 2019 – Late Breaking Posters. HCII 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1088. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30712-7_29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30712-7_29
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