Making Understandable Game Learning Analytics for Teachers

Abstract

Abstract. When used for education, games can increase students' motivation and engagement and provide a more authentic learning environment where they can apply knowledge, making them especially suited to schools. However, actual application of such (serious) games in schools is still limited. Teachers still consider that using games is a complex process that they do not fully master and that requires extra effort from them. We consider that simplifying teachers' tasks when deploying games is crucial to promote their use. In classroom scenarios, teachers can greatly benefit from knowing what is happening as a serious game is being played. Game learning analytics (GLA) is the process of collecting, analyzing and displaying student interaction data with the games to improve the educational experience. GLA can be used both at real-time, providing teachers with information while their students are still playing, and offline, inspecting already-finished game sessions. In both cases, analytics is only useful when it manages to bridge the gap between large collections of interaction data and pedagogically sound insight. Analytics dashboards should therefore provide not only complete but meaningful and easy-to-understand information, considering that teachers will most probably not know all the details of the analyses performed underneath. In this paper, we review our experiences on game learning analytics dashboards for teachers, and describe some of the steps we have taken to improve our dashboards.

Learning Analytics Dashboards in Educational Games

“…Besides students, teachers can also benefit from LA dashboards by monitoring their students' progress and evaluating the effectiveness of the learning resources they use (i.e., learning supports and materials) and their instructional methods (e.g., Alonso-Fernández et al, 2019;Calvo-Morata et al, 2018). As a result, teachers may decide to change their teaching strategy (e.g., when they see most of their students struggling on a topic) or replace some learning resources that appear ineffective.…”

“…However, despite the empirical evidence for digital games being useful for students' learning, the use of educational games in classrooms is still low (Chaudy & Connolly, 2018;Papadakis, 2018). One missing piece of the puzzle could be explicitly connecting gameplay and learning and making that visible for various stakeholders (e.g., students, teachers, parents) (Alonso-Fernández et al, 2019;Calvo-Morata et al, 2018;Chaudy & Connolly, 2018). Such visual representations of gameplay and learning are important parts of learning analytics (LA) dashboards in educational games.…”

Validation of a Cyberbullying Serious Game Using Game Analytics

“…For this game, the visualizations generated for the teacher display the in-game locations of players, their relationship with classmates, their in-story decisions, and, for players that have finished the game, the specific ending that has been reached. In addition, data provide the information needed to understand how players are interacting with the game, including, for example, how much time they have spent in each scene [32]. This can be useful to know if, when and where players are getting stuck in the game.…”

Lessons learned applying learning analytics to assess serious games

“…GLA data was used at near real-time to allow teachers to monitor what students were doing while they were playing the game (Calvo-Morata, Alonso-Fernández, Freire, Martínez-Ortiz, & Fernández-Manjón, 2018). This information was provided using a dashboard that comprised several visualizations including the ones depicted in Figure 3 Results of GLA helped to identify some design problems, for instance, the first version of the game (tested in an initial formal evaluation with N=64 students) took too long to complete and left no additional time for discussion with the teacher; this was amended in the second version of the game.…”