Las masacres: estrategias para sembrar el terror

A core principal of MiniNauts, is that of content-agnosticism. The purpose of content-agnosticism is twofold. Firstly, content for educational games can be strongly or weakly coupled with game mechanics. For practical purposes, particularly with modern curriculums, one size may not fit all. Therefore, MiniNauts aims to remove the content of the reading comprehension activities from the actual mechanics of the game. This means that the educational content is decoupled from the gameplay of the video game. As previously discussed in Section 2.2.2.6, a strong coupling of content to the video game may increase enjoyment, but limits replayability and increases development burden.

With the requirements of the software in mind, it is the purpose of the Content Setup portion of the Teacher Portal to enable teachers to perform the administrative task of designing reading comprehension activities, for use in MiniNauts. Figure 4-23 illustrates the layout of the Content Setup main page of the Teacher Portal. The page is broken into two sections; the left, is composed of paragraphs of text that are to be read

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by the students. To the right, are MCQs which are presented to the students during gameplay, dependent upon control group.

The content setup is accomplished with the following procedures:

1. The teacher enters the core text for the video game into each of the four paragraphs input fields. The website automatically breaks down the text into individual sentences that can be manipulated. A reading age score is calculated by the system, using the Hertfordshire Reading Test methodology; the use of this score was a minor requirement requested by teacher participants.

2. The teacher enters one to several statements for each paragraph, in the corresponding table to the right of the paragraph text. A statement is a sentence which relates to the paragraph text in some way, much like the individual options of a multiple-choice quiz. For example, if the paragraph text read: An example of some MCQ content is presented in Table 25.

Paragraph Text Statements

“John was a naughty child. He enjoyed breaking

all of his toys.”

John was a good child.

John had a lot of friends as a child.

John enjoyed being destructive.

Table 25 MCQ Example Content

Each statement can be regarded as either true or false in relation to the context of the paragraph story. Each statement can also be verified for its truth or falsehood by a corresponding sentence in the text.

3. The teacher establishes these relationships with a simple click and drag mechanism, and the video games are automatically updated to reflect the new content and relationships.

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Figure 4-23 Teacher Portal Content Setup

Recording student performance in educational games is an important way of gauging the efficacy of the video game as a learning aid. MiniNauts automatically collects various data points on the play of each student. Statistics such as play time, correct and incorrect actions as well as high scores are all recorded. It is hypothesized that as the primary goals of each video game is to succeed at a reading comprehension task, success at the video game may correlate to an increase in reading comprehension. Along with individual student performance, a teacher is responsible for the class’ overall reading performance. It is with this in mind, that the Teacher Portal contains the facility for teachers to view the overall trend of the class when it comes to the metrics of the game (refer to Figure 4-22). Change over time, along with average score and time are displayed to the teacher, as a tool for gauging the overall performance of the video game.

The Teacher Portal, as previously described, acts as a Content Management System (CMS) for the MGS. The Teacher Portal is accessible to participants via the internet, as a web page. The web page utilises PHP and jQuery to provide a consistent and modern user interface. Tooltips and hints are provided throughout the system, to promote correct and meaningful engagement with the system. Teacher Participants are allowed to modify game content but are not responsible for adding or removing students from the system. Students initially create their player profile in the MGS, which the teacher

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can view, but cannot modify. The teacher is able to view specific game metrics, in both a tabular and graph form.

4.8

Summary

This Chapter has presented a detailed process for the design of a serious game for reading comprehension. This Chapter began by describing the requirements elicitation process with teachers from a Tasmanian school. Several of these requirements were then translated and used as input for the Behaviour Change Wheel Methodology. The result of this methodology was a detailed analysis of the problem behaviour identified, along with several target behaviours and strategies which could enable behaviour change. The link between game elements and Behaviour Change Techniques was then explored, with the result of this process being a map of game elements that were tied to learning mechanics. This Chapter then presented a comprehensive design summary of a Mini-Game Systems for reading comprehension. The Teacher Portal was described in detail, along with the design decisions and stylistic choices of the MiniNauts serious game. Reading comprehension activities were described in the manner that they appeared in the MGS, and systems for gamifying this content were explored. The following Chapter will describe the second portion of this study’s methodology, with respect to data collection techniques, tools, and cohort selection.

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