Identifying the User Needs of Educational Video Games in Bulgarian

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Identifying the User Needs of Educational Video Games in Bulgarian Schools

Valentina Terzieva1, Elena Paunova-Hubenova1 and Boyan Bontchev2 1Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Bulgarian Academy of Science, Sofia, Bulgaria 2Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia, Bulgaria [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

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Abstract: In the last decades, game-based learning has gained an increasing popularity in many countries worldwide. Learning by playing computer games gives school students some undeniable advantages over classical teaching: students are motivated to learn; they are an active part of the learning process; information is acquired in a pleasant way and is remembered for a longer period of time; students develop a more positive attitude towards the subject matter. Despite the undoubted advantages of using educational games in the learning process, this practice is still slightly unpopular in countries like Bulgaria. Recent studies show that most Bulgarian teachers are not quite acquainted with the concept and application of learning games. This paper outlines most important findings of a case study focused on the identification of the needs of target user group (schoolteachers and students) for specific types of educational computer games in classroom practice. The study is conducted in the scope of the APOGEE (smart adaPtive videO GamEs for Education) research project and aims at establishing a clear and relevant view of the current problems and needs of using game-based learning in Bulgarian schools. After a brief introduction of the main types of educational video games, their origins and their application in school education both worldwide and in Bulgaria, the paper provides a background in the previous research studies in the area. Next, it defines the target group and describes the methodology of the case study including structured interviews with the target users, aiding in the identification of the main problems, followed by a quantitative study applying a specially created questionnaire about the need of specific types of educational video games. The paper outlines some of the preliminary results gathered from two surveys conducted online and targeted to teachers and to school students and, as well, provides an initial analysis of the statistical significance of the difference of the answers to some specific questions. The results will serve as an up-todate foundation for the development of further stages of a project based research in automatic construction of educational video games. Keywords: user needs, educational video games, school education, Bulgaria, APOGEE

1. Introduction

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In the past decades, digital games proved as a highly interactive visual media able to incorporate knowledge, didactic tasks, and virtual objects in an appealing and highly interactive way. Video games are able to recreate both tangible and intangible cultural artefacts (Bontchev, 2016) by providing increasingly powerful immersion and high engagement by an integrated form of fun and play (Gee, 2003). Both entertainment and serious video games can reflect the human culture and provide a transformative cultural play (Salen and Zimmerman, 2004) offering autonomous learning in the game context, а free choice of the learning place, time, and speed in addition to problem-solving, systemic-thinking, and cooperation opportunities (Karner and Härtel, 2010). All types of computer games could be used for educational purposes and aligned with the modern understanding of the need for experiential learning (Kolb, 1984), or the so-called “learning by doing”. Specific features of video games and the use of creative game-based learning (GBL) scenarios (ProActive, 2011) make learning more effective than traditional teaching approaches regarding students’ motivation and engagement (Stoimenova, 2011) and, hence, resulting in better learning achievements (Papastergiou, 2009).

The presented research is within the scope of project APOGEE, aimed at the creation and practical validation of an innovative open software platform for the construction of smArt adaPtive videO GamEs for Education (APOGEE). The project goal is to cover the gap between the lack of a simple but effective open software platform for an easy construction of educational video games by non-IT professionals and the need of a large number of specialised and customisable educational video games in specific learning domains. The paper provides, in brief, a classification of the educational computer games, their usage in schools, and related studies in this area. Furthermore, it presents the motivation and main goals of the APOGEE research

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2. Theoretical background 2.1 Types of educational video games

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project as well as details about the survey questionnaires concerning user needs of educational games. Next, the paper comments the initial results of the surveys and provides conclusions and directions for future work.

Video games are a kind of fun activity that takes place in the context of virtual reality, in which participants try to achieve a goal (or some goals) by acting in accordance with the rules. The progress of ICT influences contemporary educational games, so most innovative ones have an adaptation through monitoring and analysing the player’s behaviour and response. Thus, the desired impact on students can be achieved. There are different principles for classification of educational computer games – some of them follow below: Technical indicators – the platform for which they are designed (computer, console, mobile device); mode of creation (open-source or commercial); mode of distribution (paid or free of charge);

Game rules – with or without established rules, creative games and mixed ones;

The way of playing – with one or many participants:

linear or non-linear (with a pre-fixed or selectable structure, scenario, and series of challenges);

adaptive or non-adaptive (changeable or not according to the player's behaviour and reactions);

Relationships between players – cooperative (non-competitive) and antagonistic (competitive) games;

Purpose – for developing coordination and reflexes; acquiring knowledge and skills in specific areas, etc.

Game genres – simulators, adventures, puzzles, social, logic and board games, mazes with built-in learning tasks, etc.

Didactic domain – for example, serious video games applied for education especially in history and culture fall in four main categories: interactive virtual museums, 3D virtual reconstructions and geo-referenced models, cultural simulators of intangible heritage, and knowledge acquisition games (Bontchev, 2016).

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Modern video games tend to include automated conversational entities such as non-playing characters (NPCs), playing the role of personal assistants doing tasks for the player, competitors or opponents (Salen and Zimmerman, 2004). They are well accepted by real players in the way people interact with chatbots as a regular part of a chat room. Question-answering was proposed first in role-playing games (Kacmarcik, 2005) but appears to be very important for any game having NPCs. The smart ones should provide adequate answers to the player´s questions, especially to those within the game domain. The increased availability of various digital educational games lately has led to their extended use in schools. Recently, Bulgarian teachers started appreciating this resource too and considering it as useful, so it is frequently employed in the teaching process. These games become pervasive, especially in primary (1st to 4th grade) schools where more than half of teachers rely on them often while in middle (5th to 7th grade) schools only between a quarter and a third (depending on the learning subject) use them almost every day (Terzieva et al, 2016).

2.2 Previous research

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Many recent studies demonstrated the benefits of GBL as a relatively new method of e-learning; however, its massive use is hampered by the lack of free tools and platforms for the creation and customisation of educational games by teachers and non-IT specialists. Generation of simple drill-and-practice computer games oriented to the curricular goals of the traditional classroom (Ito, 2008) cannot serve as a universal mean for GBL en masse. Generators of simple 3D video labyrinths of different types with rooms and tunnels with learning content and cognitive tasks in the form of desktop games (Bontchev and Panayotova, 2017) provide an initial step in this direction. In addition to that, an effective game generation process should be based on a framework for describing and analysing games such as the ontology proposed by the Game Ontology Project (Zagal and Mateas, 2010) and including interfaces, rules, goals, entities, and entity manipulations. For a greater effect, modern video games should adjust their features such as task difficulty, object speed, learning content, etc. depending on the current outcomes and emotional state of the player. Thus, players would be able to make more meaningful choices according to their skill levels, cognitive abilities, emotions, and improvement of performance (Kivikangas et al, 2011). Therefore, gameplay should be adapted to the context of

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the individual player by applying a specific player´s model. Player-centric modelling tracks and measures human behaviour and allows researchers and game designers to adapt the game according to some characteristics of the player such as style (Peirce, Conlan and Wade, 2008), emotions, affect, performance, and skills (Ibrahim et al, 2012). Recently, the ADAPTIMES (ADAPTIve player-centric serious video gaMES) holistic player-centric model was proposed as a solution for implicitly identifying the playing skills, cognitive outcomes, emotional state, and playing/learning style (Bontchev and Georgieva, 2018) and applying them for dynamic adaptation of game mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics (Kacmarcik, 2005).

Development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) significantly influences the modern education both in Bulgaria and the world. Their applications such as video, interactive/multimedia applications and games become a must and are an essential part of any e-learning system or technology-enhanced learning platform. Bulgarian scientists and teachers report that serious games are successfully used as part of modern digital technologies in the form of an additional or essential element in education for all age groups (Bontchev, Vassileva and Traicheva, 2011). Projects in the field of serious games such as ADOPTA (Vassileva, 2012), „Mobile games in youth work“ (http://mgames-youth.org/), and "Learning data analytics for ICT resource integration in Bulgarian schools" (http://hsi.iccs.bas.bg/projects/MPIKT/) are initiated and implemented in Bulgaria either at national level or jointly with leading research teams and organizations within the EU. These projects aim to create learning games or develop tools for constructing and adapting educational content and games as an additional element in a blended learning process. However, an essential disadvantage is that they still do not provide the content creators with the opportunity to design themselves educational games following the pedagogical strategy they have chosen.

3. Towards an open online platform for smart adaptive video games for education 3.1 Motivation

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In today’s society, global migration is widespread. This undeniable fact raises many problems, a significant part of which is related to education and culture. Very often, immigrant and emigrant children find it difficult to adapt to the new educational system. In such cases, GBL is especially suitable, as it can also be applied remotely. Apart from having a role in school learning, educational games focused on training in native languages, or thematically related to the history and geography of the home country, also have an essential role in building and maintaining a relationship with the country of origin which is far away. An additional motivation is the global lack of platforms and tools for creating smart adaptive video games for learning. Especially deficient are such tools for non-IT specialists like school-teachers (Bontchev and Panayotova, 2017). Thus, we choose the prototype games to be focused on the medieval history of Bulgaria because this period is full of remarkable events that can inspire all school students. The topic specifically addresses the large population of Bulgarian emigrants’ children who barely know something about their motherland’s history while living and learning abroad. Many teachers are willing to develop educational games, but only a few of them have already done it (Paunova-Hubenova et al, 2018): although above half of the Bulgarian teachers express willingness to participate in the creation of educational ICT resources and games, a large part of them (43%) respond negatively because of the lack of time, experience, or skills. Only 3% say that they have already participated in such an activity. About 36% apply educational games in their practice often – at least once a week, and 39% use them rarely – once a month, while a quarter does not use such learning resources. Nowadays, teachers find educational games more helpful than previously – 62% believe the games are very useful, a third – useful and just 6% – less useful or useless.

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3.2 Project goals

The primary goal of the current project is the creation of an open software platform for the construction of smart and customisable player-centric adaptive 3D video maze games with intelligent virtual players, i.e. smart NPCs. The validation will be conducted through practical experiments of constructing game prototypes in the context of Bulgarian medieval history chosen as a socially significant, complex, and content-rich teaching domain. The platform will be applied together with a methodology allowing for the easy creation of such games by non-IT specialists. The goals of the innovative project are determined as follows:

Identifying a formal approach to a declarative description of educational game scenarios using semantically structured game content and didactic tasks;

Creating a software platform for the construction and generation of smart adaptive 3D labyrinth video games consisting of a metadata-driven Maze Editor and a Unity3D-based Maze Builder (Figure 1) using an

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Valentina Terzieva, Elena Paunova-Hubenova and Boyan Bontchev adaptation control engine, an intelligent question and answering (Q&A) agent, declarative game description and semantically structured virtual representation of artefacts; Generation of video game prototypes about Bulgarian medieval history using the platform, and self-created 3D graphic models and game content, pro-active GBL scenarios, and didactic tasks, with both simple and smart virtual players supporting the real player in resolving the tasks;

Applying the holistic player-centric model for implementing adaptive versions of the online video games according to the player´s achievements, excitement, and emotions, based on behaviour tracking and assessing the player´s emotions and attention;

Validating both non-adaptive and adaptive versions of the video games through practical online experiments with teachers and school students, followed by analyses of experimental results and expected benefits.

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Figure 1: A general view of the APOGEE platform for construction of smart adaptive 3D video maze games

4. Methodology of the study

The APOGEE project started with a case study aimed at the identification of the user needs of educational video games in Bulgarian elementary schools. The authors studied the user needs from two perspectives:

The viewpoint of the teachers predisposed to apply educational video games supporting and enhancing the teaching process;

The viewpoint of the learners willing to play educational video games and, thus, to achieve a better learning process.

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The teachers and school students represented our target groups of educational game users. At this age, students are curious and often play many different games with ease, so it is more probable for them to play educational games as well. Furthermore, the maze games do not require precise coordination or fast reactions and have an easy gameplay and thus the player can concentrate on the content. These games offer predominantly didactic tasks aimed at gaining and memorising information on some topics which are the main goals in the school education. In the early school years, students acquire the essential knowledge base by learning different subjects, but they still prefer to play games and have fun. Their eagerness to play can be used with an educational purpose by recommending them appropriate gaming products that deliver learning content actively. For identifying the needs of specific types of educational video games, the authors conducted two quantitative studies applying specifically created online questionnaires (http://apogee.online). The first survey was targeted at schoolteachers. It aimed at exploring the needs and preferences of non-IT specialists for platforms facilitating the creation of intelligent educational video games. As well, we tried to find out how teachers and students use such resources in their practice. We used structured interviews conducted with 17 teachers in order to identify all the 21 questions for the online survey. They were arranged in two parts: Applicability of educational video games – 14 questions, and Platform usability – 7 questions. The authors used five-point Likert scale questions to

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measure the expressed attitudes and opinions with a greater degree of nuance. The first questions helped us to identify the respondents’ profile and to examine their experience with technological tools and resources. Then followed questions about the use of educational video games in the class and the willingness of educators to participate in their creation. They also examined the views of teachers on the application of educational video games. An essential part of the survey consisted in the identification of types of mini-games embedded into the video maze that have to achieve specific pedagogical goals and to support effectively various aspects of the teaching process. Last questions examined the teachers' views on interactions with the platform needed for creation and adaptation of video games.

The second survey was targeted at school students. It aimed at exploring their needs and preferences for specific types of educational video games. The questionnaire consisted of 22 questions – about a third of them were multiple-choice or with free answers, while others were five-point Likert scale rating questions for precise measurement of the students’ attitudes. Initially, the authors identified the respondents’ profile and examined their experience with games – how often, how many hours and what kind of games have they played the most. Then followed a group of questions about the use of educational video games in classes: types, benefits, how often do they play such games in different subjects, which games do they prefer, etc. The final part of questions concerned the preferences of students about educational video games.

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Both the surveys were conducted online with questionnaires in Bulgarian and published by means of Google Forms after finishing a demonstration seminar with structured interviews with teachers. The invitations for participating in the surveys were sent via e-mail. The number of collected answers from teachers is N=109 Bulgarian teachers and Figure 2 (left) presents their profiles. The same figure (right) shows that only 14% are not going to use educational video games in the classroom, while 23% already do it.

Figure 2: Teacher profiles (left) and usage of educational video games in the classroom (right) The number of collected answers from students is N=179, aged between 9 and 18 years (M=15.062, SD=1.975, SE=0.1480). The gender balance of the students’ sample appeared to be rather equilibrated – 82 boys and 97 girls participated in the online quiz.

5. Initial results

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This section presents, in brief, some of the preliminary results gathered by conducting the surveys described above. Here, there are reported only the questions about the profile of the respondents and those targeted to both students and teachers in order to reveal the differences between their viewpoints.

Students’ game profiles were determined by means of questions about gaming experience (Ventura, Shute, & Kim, 2012), namely:

about the amount of video game play: average hours of video games played per week; total hours spent on favourite video games; the number of different video games typically played in a year. Figure 3 provides the amount of video game play of the student respondents;

about preferred game type - the respondents were asked to rate how much do they enjoy playing the main types of video games as shown in the first row in Table 1.

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Figure 3: Amount of time spent on video gameplay by the surveyed students

According to the results presented in Figure 3, the majority of the students are occasional players, who are not stuck to a favourite game and, as well, play less than four games per year. Only one-third of them are really keen on playing video games. The preferred game types are shooters, platformers, strategy, and simulation games. Only 34.64% of the respondents reported enjoying the playing of educational games. Table 1: Preferred video games for the students Sta- Sport tistic games M 2.6158 SD 1.3814 SE

0.1041

RPG

Action Puzzle adventure

Social Platformer Strategy Simulations Shooters Fighting Serious media games

2.5920

2.9375

2.8523

2.5556

3.2069

3.1053

3.0347

3.2743

2.7168

2.8580

1.4782

1.5011

1.4425

1.4147

1.4396

1.3419

1.4663

1.6061

1.4886

1.3468

0.1124

0.1135

0.1090

0.1085

0.1095

0.1029

0.1118

0.1218

0.1135

0.1018

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The authors asked both students and teachers several common questions. The first one is “Video games offer learning opportunities and are an effective means of supporting the considered processes” (see the left-most column of Table 2 as answers). The mean values of the answers (five-point Likert scale: from 1 – definitely No to 5 – definitely Yes) are between 3.20 and 3.73 for the students and between 3.71 and 4.23 for the teachers. The answers are graded. This difference is approximately half of a point and is (proven by a T-test) statistically significant (p-value is less than 0.0001). Therefore, teachers appeared to be more positive than students about benefits of educational games. Table 2: Video games offer learning opportunities and effective support to the following processes Value Answers

Experimenting with knowledge capturing Controlling the learning process Experiential learning Stimulating the transfer of knowledge Interacting with other students Developing critical thinking Motivating learners

Students (N=179) M SD SE 3.4773 1.2465 0.0942 3.2035 1.2088 0.0924 3.5202 1.1792 0.0899 3.7267 1.1295 0.0864 3.6379 1.1684 0.0888 3.6307 1.2761 0.0965 3.4773 1.2465 0.0942

Teachers (N=109) M SD SE 4.0583 1.0273 0.1012 3.7087 1.1344 0.1118 4.2264 0.9689 0.0941 4.2404 0.9704 0.0952 4.0971 0.9652 0.0951 3.8235 1.1808 0.1169 4.2286 0.9733 0.0950

Diff. ΔM 0.5810 0.5052 0.7062 0.5137 0.4592 0.1928 0.5810

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Another question, asked both students and teachers, addresses the types of digital games eligible for education: “Are the following types of educational games appropriate for the learning purposes?” Table 3 presents the results for students and teachers. Table 3: Appropriateness of the following types of educational games for learning purposes Value Answers Simulators Adventure games Social games Physical exercise games Shooting games Interactive environments and virtual museums Puzzles, logical games and board games Educational labyrinth with built-in learning tasks

Students (N=179) M SD SE 3.2426 1.3162 0.1015 3.6886 1.2069 0.0937 3.3706 1.2056 0.0927 3.1617 1.2768 0.0991 3.2874 1.5054 0.1168 3.1310 1.3561 0.1049 3.3099 1.3732 0.1053 3.2202 1.3152 0.1018

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Teachers (N=109) M SD SE 3.7000 1.0419 0.1053 3.9250 1.0458 0.1043 3.9607 0.9035 0.0906 3.6050 1.1023 0.1117 2.4694 1.3322 0.1360 4.2028 0.9519 0.0945 4.3085 0.8416 0.0836 4.3012 0.8193 0.0816

Diff. ΔM 0.4574 0.2364 0.5901 0.4433 -0.8181 1.0718 0.9986 1.0810


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The answers of the teachers to the same question about the appropriateness of the digital educational games for the primary and secondary schools are very similar (with an average difference of means less than 0.1), so the table presents the averaged results. Like for the previous question, teachers appeared to be more positive than students about the appropriateness of video game types for learning (p