ADAPTIMES

ADAPTIve player-centric serious video gaMES

The ADAPTIMES (ADAPTIve player-centric serious video gaMES) project aims at investigating how cognitive abilities, psycho-emotional processes and playing style can be used as a basis for efficient and effective player-centric adaptivity in serious games. For understanding how these three mental characteristics of the player are related to game adaptivity, the project will use a novel combination of methods and techniques. Cognitive abilities and processes will be tracked while player performs creative and challenging tasks requiring both divergent thinking (for finding various possible solutions) and convergent thinking (for choosing the best solution), and also measured by psychometric tests. On other side, psycho-emotional status and processes and playing style are going to be accessed by means of non-intrusive behavioral measuring techniques like 3D eye tracking, gestures and interaction patterns, and navigation control. Research findings are expected to address behavioral patterns and correlation between these mental characteristics and will be used for creation of an adaptation control framework using the video engine of Brainstorm Multimedia (host institution). The framework will be integrated in serious video games targeted to one of the most promising educational areas - that of entrepreneurial education. Video games are chosen due to their immersiveness, attractiveness and visual effects useful for presenting tasks requiring entrepreneurial creativity. Via a field trial of playing the game by students in entrepreneurship, the project will validate the expected efficiency of adaptation control based on the mental characteristics of the player. Thus, the project plans to produce multidisciplinary and inter-sectoral results which will contribute to European competitiveness and will give the fellow the ideal opportunity to grow professionally and to fulfill a real knowledge transfer and to establish solid ground for a long-term bilateral connection academia-industry.
Grant agreement no.: PIEF-GA-2013-624184, FP7 Marie Curie Actions, PEOPLE, Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship (IEF).
Project start: August 1, 2014
Project end: July 31, 2016
Research fellow: Prof. Boyan Bontchev
Research host: Brainstorm Multimedia


Sunday 25 October 2015

Game adaptation based on playing style

The ADAPTIMES project plans to apply ADOPTA playing styles for adaptation of game mechanics and learning content. ADOPTA playing styles are based on the Kolb´s theory of experiential learning, in the context of playing digital games applied for education and training. The project tries to identify key features of these styles and, net, to develop a questionnaire for measuring these playing styles reflecting their. This questionnaire will be used for a pilot study administrating a joint online questionnaire about gaming experience and both ADOPTA playing styles and Honey and Mumford’s learning styles. The study will aim at finding quality characteristics of the playing style questionnaire including its internal consistency, concurrent validity, and reliability.

Learning styles of Kolb versus styles of Honey and Mumford

Wednesday 1 July 2015

CUSTOMIZABLE 3D VIDEO GAMES AS EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE

Until present ambition projects in the area of serious games were successfully tested, educational games for higher education are still not a popular mean for teaching. In fact, there are no free and customizable software platforms for easy creation of attractive video games by non-IT specialists. Simple drill-and-practice computer games oriented to curricular goals of the traditional classroom appear not to be a universal tool for K12 and higher education. Obviously, this hampers massive use of such games for educational purposes. At the same time, tools for creation of educational games should be available for domain specialists, as far as they know better urgent needs of modern education and training.
Thus, is appears important to find new opportunities for practical and massive exploitation of the serious video games for higher education, by offering teachers and students free tools/platforms for customizable video game creation by non-software domain specialists. An open software platform for easy creation and flexible customization of video games for teaching students in any subject is under development. The platform generates 3D mazes and embedded mini-games for assessment or fostering visual skills and creativity. Teachers can construct easily customizable mazes in their educational domain as a non-restricted hierarchical graph allowing non-linear student gameplay and, next, customize maze nodes using a property editor by shaping each node as they like and by adding multimedia content to it. Playing such maze games, students can learn new ideas, concepts and theories while exploring the customized 3D maze at each hierarchy level for finding the final maze node which may contain some special gift for them. As well, they can play several embedded mini-games for developing fine-motor brain skills, visual and spatial thinking, context-based reasoning and entrepreneurial creativity. Read more at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281522459_CUSTOMIZABLE_3D_VIDEO_GAMES_AS_EDUCATIONAL_SOFTWARE



Principal software architecture of the video game platform