Experiment centered design in a massively multiplayer online educational game

With the United States of America suffering from a lack of scientifically literate grade and secondary school students, educational games offer an opportunity to engage and inspire students to take interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematical (STEM) subjects. Learning assessment techniques coupled with machine learning algorithms can be utilized to record student's in-game actions and formulate a model of the student's knowledge. This paper describes "Experiment Centered Assessment Design" (XCD), a framework for structuring a learning assessment feedback loop. XCD builds on the "Evidence Centered Assessment Design" (ECD) approach, which uses tasks to elicit evidence about a student and his learning. XCD defines every task as an experiment in the scientific method, where an experiment maps a test of factors to observable outcomes. This XCD framework was applied to prototype quests in a massively multiplayer online (MMO) educational game. Future work would apply machine learning techniques to the information captured from XCD to provide feedback to students, teachers, and researchers.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Conrad, Shawn (Shawn S.)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Eric Klopfer.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/85411

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/85411