PERSONALISATION IN EDUCATIONAL GAMES – A CASE STUDY

Nowadays, with the massive penetration of fast Internet connections, e-learning has become a usual approach. Further, it is still an active research field with many innovations one of which is gamification of learning. Game-based learning can support and even substitute traditional one and sometimes it is a preferred method. Most often students of the digital generation are interacting and acquire knowledge in virtual worlds. The ubiquitous use of computers, mobile devices and gamification have considerably raised students’ expectations to a personalised experience that includes recognition of their skills and preference matching. Traditional educational games offer uniform learning resources for everyone and typically use “one-fits-all” approach. With the recent popularity of personalisation, it has become clear that it can enhance the effectiveness of teaching and increase learning outcomes for all students, as different people learn in different ways. Improving the students’ performance in educational games by providing effective personalisation of game content is a big challenge for the developers. The educational games face many challenges in pedagogical (e.g., the design of lessons structure, learning content and tasks), and technical aspects (e.g. resource provision). This paper presents a concept for personalisation of educational games developed in the scope of project APOGEE. It is based on the modelling both the user (student) and the content of the game. The goal is to enhance the learning experience by customising the type of mini-games and contextualising the content of learning tasks depending on the students' profiles that appreciate their knowledge, practices, and preferences. Moreover, today's players are expecting a personalised gaming experience as personalisation appear to be ubiquitous in all domains. The current study shows how students can enjoy such learning experience anywhere, any time with educational video games that are adaptable and personalised where possible. The paper presents a framework that aims to provide a personalised and adapted game-based learning by incorporating different gamified educational tasks that are thought to raise both learning and gaming engagement. Therefore, the model of personalisation recognises parameters such as player’s skills, performance, as well as learning and playing style. Making personalisation involves taking into account the initial user’s data (profile) and further, extracting information about interactions within the game. In our case, the developed user model includes both the characteristics as a learner and as a player. Such data help to update an individual player model and enable making recommendations and customisation of chosen mini-games for the player. The focus is on personalisation of the game accordingly, aiming to sustain the student’s enjoyment, giving them a better experience, meeting their requirements and rewarding their efforts and knowledge. The study also presents survey findings of the preferences of different groups of school students for games and types of gamified learning tasks (mini-games). Furthermore, the idea is to support adaptation and personalisation of educational content and further to achieve its reusability and interoperability, thus to provide the easily manageable tool for teachers to create personalised educational video games offering individual learning paths.