Situated Psychological Agents: A Methodology for Educational Games

Abstract

Featured Application: The present paper introduces a methodology based on situated psychological agents that can be fruitfully applied to design and implement educational games, as it permits to represent the flows inside the game on the educational, psychological, and pedagogical level while detailing agents' features at a psychological level.Abstract: In recent years, the ever-increasing need for valid and effective training to acquire competences in multiform contexts has led to a wide diffusion of educational games (EG). In spite of their diffusion, there is still a need to reflect on the design process that should embed the games' pedagogical potential and the instructional process in the entertainment scope. Moreover, as building EG, especially in digital environments, is an enterprise that involves specialists with different expertise, it can be useful to have a shared methodology that is easily understandable and usable by many users. In this paper, we propose to use situated psychological agents (SPA) as a methodology to design and build effective EG and show how to represent games in terms of SPA and their interactions by diagrams and describe different examples of how this approach has been applied. Appl. Sci. 2019, 9, 4887 2 of 22 and social media to obtain information. The world where education takes place is no more limited to the physical classroom but is expanded to cover potentially an unlimited world, in terms of space and time, that is totally or partially virtual. If we consider the tools that have been introduced in the educational context, it seems that, in spite of their wide diffusion, there is still a need to reflect on the methodology to design, implement, and use them in a learning scenario.In more detail, it can be a useful reflection on the methodology to design and implement educational games, as an effective methodology should permit to have a shared formal representation of the main game elements, of their connections and their interactions.In what follows, we will propose a methodology that meets this requirement, which is based on the situated psychological agents (SPA) approach, connecting it to the EG design process. Educational and Serious Games: The Design ProcessSerious games are games that educate, train, and inform, to use the title of the highly cited paper by Michael and Chen [5]. Since the first book by Abt [11], which referred to card and board games, serious games have become digital and have strongly affirmed their educational potentials [12,13]. This fact forces to critically reflect on this kind of games, as they intervene in the learning process in a way that has not been faced yet in traditional learning theory and typical game theory as well. Many remarkable theoretical frameworks have been proposed, also recently, to satisfy this need. Among these, it is useful to cite the learning mechanics-game mechanics model [14], which draws a set of pre-defined game mechanics and pedagogical elements abstracted from the literature and connects them to identify the ma...

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