Exploring Play-Learners' Analytics in a Serious Game for Literacy Improvement

A diagram that has 16 circles for the different levels in the Apostrophe Power game. There are four categories (Ownership, Contractions, Misfits and Combination), which each have 4 levels. There are arrows of differing thickness between the circles.
One of the visualisations from the article, which shows a summary of how players navigated through the Apostrope Power game. The thicker the arrows are, the more common the pathway through the game was.

Details

Shamus P. Smith, Daniel Hickmott, Erica Southgate, Ross Bille and Liz Stephens

Presented at the Joint International Conference on Serious Games 2016 conference

In Brisbane, Australia during September 2016

Abstract

The collection and analysis of analytics incorporated into serious games provides researchers with objective data on player behavior related to serious game design elements and learning. Such analytics offer insights about play-learners engagement that is not possible to capture through traditional techniques. Visualization of learning behavior data can allow for a comparison between the pedagogical intent of the game design and the play-learners actual behavior within the serious game. This paper describes the use of game-play logs to identify pathways through gaming content in a serious game app for literacy improvement. The paper describes the technical aspects of processing game-play logs and their transformation into visualizations, and considers how these visualizations can be used to explore play-learner behavior in relation to the pedagogical intent of activities embedded in the serious game app.

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