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Vr-engage: a virtual reality educational game that incorporates intelligence
Cover page
Submission title:
VR-ENGAGE: A Virtual Reality Educational Game that
Incorporates Intelligence. Submission type: Authors:
Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus Address:
University of Piraeus 80, Karaoli and Dimitriou St., Piraeus 185 34, Greece
Ph.D. Student at the Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus Address:
Ph.D. Student at the Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus Address:
Ph.D. Student at the Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus Address:
Contact author: Maria Abstract
Electronic games have become part of children’s culture. Children and adolescents are quite happy to spend many hours playing a game just for the fun of it. On the other hand educational syllabus may look quite dry to children and adolescents. In this paper, we describe VR-ENGAGE, a virtual reality game that has been constructed for teaching geography to students in a motivating way. Thus the captivating effects of electronic games may come into service for the purposes of education. The game is enriched with learner modeling mechanisms that ensure the individualization of the interaction. The game has been evaluated and the results were very encouraging.
VR-ENGAGE: A Virtual Reality Educational Game that Incorporates Intelligence Abstract
children inside the classroom walls [6]. Indeed, a major
issue is how to design an educational system that is
Computer games have become part of children’s
beneficial to students. Towards this end, there is a need
culture. Children and adolescents are quite happy to
for the integration of successful methods, ideas and
spend many hours playing a game just for the fun of it.
approaches of educational software technology, such as
On the other hand educational syllabus may look quite
the adaptivity abilities of Intelligent Tutoring Systems
dry to children and adolescents. In this paper, we describe VR-ENGAGE, a virtual reality game that has
ITSs have been quite good at providing dynamic
been constructed for teaching geography to students in a
aspects to the reasoning ability of educational
motivating way. Thus the captivating effects of electronic
applications. This is mainly due to their student modeling
games may come into service to the purposes of
component that aims at gaining an understanding of how a
education. The game is enriched with student modeling
student learns and what the student’s misconceptions may
mechanisms that ensure the individualization of the
be. Indeed, as Self [7] points out, ITSs are computer-
interaction. The game has been evaluated and the results
based learning systems, which attempt to adapt to the
needs of learners and are therefore the only such systems,
which “care” about learners in that sense.
In this paper, we present a virtual reality educational
1. Introduction
game for geography. The game is called VR-ENGAGE which stands for Virtual Reality - Educational Negotiation
Game on Geography. The environment of the game aims
Children and adolescents are often fascinated by
at increasing students’ motivation and engagement.
electronic games. Indeed, it has been widely
However, the game also incorporates intelligence. It has
acknowledged that electronic games are part of the
the main components of an ITS, namely the domain
popular culture of many children [1]. Children’s fixation
knowledge, the student modeling component and the
with these games initially alarmed parents and educators,
tutoring component. In particular, the student modeling
but educational researchers soon questioned whether the
component models the student’s knowledge and his/her
motivation to play could be tapped and harnessed for
ability to reason plausibly about domain knowledge
acquired. In this way, while playing, students may practice
Hence a lot of researchers have recently highlighted
both their factual knowledge on geography and their
the advantages of computer games relating to education.
reasoning ability and thus they are led to “enjoyable”
For example, Papert [3] points out that video games teach
children that some forms of learning are fast-paced,
The main body of this paper is organized as follows:
immensely compelling and rewarding. Boyle [4] notes that
In Section 2 the environment of the game is described and
games can produce engagement and delight in learning. In
discussed. In Section 3 we describe the story of the game,
addition it has been argued [5] that games represent one
which incorporates pedagogic features from educational
way in which learners can be introduced into
software technology. In Section 4 we describe the student
constructivist micro worlds, since users do not just study a
modeling component. In Section 5 we describe an
particular domain but become part of the scenario.
evaluation that we conducted and finally in Section 6 we
However, if educators are to include electronic games
give the conclusions drawn from this research.
as part of the curriculum then there is a need to do much
more than invite the popular electronic games culture of
and stimulating them to think, a player may turn off the
2. The Virtual Reality Environment of the
sound if s/he feels that s/he is disrupted.
3. Rewards, Prizes, Threats, Negotiation and
The environment of a game plays a very important role
Virtual Companions
for its popularity. Griffiths [8] after conducting a
questionnaire and interview study, found that the
The story of VR-ENGAGE incorporates a lot of
machine’s “aura” typified by characteristics such as
elements from adventure games. However, each of these
music, lights, colors and noise was perceived as one of the
elements is connected to ideas and pedagogic approaches
machine’s most exciting features for a large part of the
The ultimate goal of a player is to navigate through a
The environment of VR-ENGAGE is similar to that of
virtual world and find the book of wisdom, which is
the popular game called “DOOM” [9] which has many
hidden. To achieve the ultimate goal, the player has to be
virtual theme worlds with castles and dragons that the
able to go through all the passages of the virtual worlds
player has to navigate through and achieve the goal of
that are guarded by dragons and to obtain a score of
reaching the exit. VR-ENGAGE has also many virtual
points, which is higher than a predefined threshold. The
worlds where the student has to navigate through. There
total score is the sum of the points that the player has
are mediaeval castles in foreign lands, castles under the
water, corridors and passages through the fire, temples
In particular, while the player is navigating through the
hiding secrets, dungeons and dragons. The main
virtual world, s/he finds closed doors, which are guarded
similarity of VR-ENGAGE with computer games like
by dragons as illustrated in the example of Figure 1. A
DOOM lies in their use of a 3D-engine. However, VR-
guard dragon poses a question to the player from the
ENGAGE unlike DOOM and other computer games of
domain of geography. If players give a correct answer
this kind is not violent at all and is connected to an
then they receive full points for this question and the
dragon allows them to continue their way through the
VR-ENGAGE communicates its messages to students
door, which leads them closer to the “book of wisdom”.
through animated agents or through windows that display
text. When a student is asked a question s/he may type the answer in a dialog box. The user interface employs two types of animated agent, the dragon which is the virtual enemy of the player and the virtual companion of the player. Both types of animated agent use synthesized voice as well as written messages. However, their voices are different so that the player may distinguish between them. The reason why the animated agents use voice is that there are studies that show that voice messages may be more effective than written ones in the way that students react to the educational applications (e.g. [10]). In addition, it was considered important for the “aura” of the game. Players are also allowed to select whether they want background music or not. If they do, they are allowed to select the background music that they prefer from a menu. The reason why in VR-ENGAGE there is a high degree of choice for the status of the background music is that there
Figure 1. A door guarded by a dragon which asks a
is controversy as to what effects background sounds may
have on performance. For example, a study conducted by
Smith [11] has shown that background sounds may be
However, if a player is not certain about the correct
stimulating but they may also have negative effects on
answer, s/he is allowed to ask the dragon for a
performance. On the other hand, another experiment,
“negotiation”. In this case the student is allowed to make a
which involved five computer games [12] has shown
guess for which s/he has to provide a justification. The
among other things that sound level had little influence on
amount of points that the student is going to receive in the
performance scores and errors. Therefore, in VR-
negotiation mode, depends on how close the student’s
ENGAGE, which is primarily aiming at educating players
answer is to the correct answer and/or how plausible the
reasoning that s/he has used is. If the answer that the
In terms of the game score, which represents the
student gives is absolutely correct then the dragon allows
student’s mark, the “negotiation’’ option may be better
him/her to proceed through the door. However, if the
than an immediate incorrect answer of the student. This is
answer is not completely correct then the system performs
so because the student may gain points for a plausible
error diagnosis. The results of the diagnosis are
guess (although they do not gain full marks) whereas if
communicated to the student through the virtual
s/he gives an immediate answer to the dragon, which is
companion agent that appears to help the student.
incorrect s/he does not receive any points at all. The idea
In the negotiation mode, the student modeling
behind this design decision is to encourage students to tell
component performs error diagnosis based on a cognitive
the truth about what they know and what they do not know
theory of Human Plausible Reasoning [13]. At the end of
and to practice their reasoning skills when they do not
this interaction, possible errors of the student and/or
evidence of the student’s lack of knowledge on a topic are
recorded in the long term student model. For example, the
4. Student Modeling in VR-ENGAGE
student may have been asked the following question:
“What is the capital town/city of the geographical
The student modeling component of VR-ENGAGE
compartment called Achaia (in Greece)?” While being in
examines the correctness of the students’ answers in terms
the negotiation mode, the student may give an answer
of the students’ factual knowledge and reasoning that they
such as: “My guess is that Rio is the capital of Achaia. I
have used. Information about each student concerning
know that Rio belongs to Achaia; Rio is an important
his/her knowledge and reasoning ability, is recorded in
town in Achaia. Therefore, it is likely that Rio is the
his/her long term student model. The long term student
capital of Achaia.” The student’s guess may be correct or
model [18] keeps a history record of the student and is
incorrect; in the case of the example, it is incorrect
updated every time the student answers a question. The
because Patras is the correct answer. However, the
long term student model is used to adapt the presentation
reasoning that s/he has used may reveal whether the
of lessons to the particular student’s knowledge and
student has a good knowledge of geography and whether
The student modeling capabilities needed for the
In this sense the game provides an environment where
negotiation mode of the game, are based on Human
there is opportunity for a negotiating teaching-learning
Plausible Reasoning theory, henceforth referred to as
dialogue between the ITS and the students. Collaborative
HPR. This theory formalizes the plausible inferences
discourse is an issue that has attracted a lot of research
based on similarities, dissimilarities, generalisations and
energy in the recent years (e.g. [14],[15]). The process of
specialisations that people often use to make plausible
becoming an expert in a certain domain should no longer
guesses about matters that they know partially. Important
be solely viewed as the acquisition of a representation of
inference patterns in the theory are the statement
correct knowledge; the knowledge to be acquired should
transforms. These inferences may lead to either correct or
incorrect guesses; in any case these guesses are plausible.
If a player does not know the answer at all or has given
HPR has been adapted and used previously in
an incorrect answer without having asked for negotiation,
intelligent environments for novice users of UNIX [19]
then s/he does not receive any points and may only
and for novice users of a Graphical User Interface [20].
continue his/her way if s/he asks for help. In such cases
Moreover, it has been applied in an ITS authoring tool
the virtual companion appears and lets the student know
[21]. The previous adaptations of HPR in a variety of
what the correct answer is, so that the door may be
domains, which were very different from one another and
opened. In addition the virtual companion suggests to the
from the present one, shows that HPR could be very
student to read a particular section of the lesson, which is
promising as an underlying reasoning mechanism in
mostly relevant to the question that s/he did not know how
educational applications. Therefore, it has been adapted
to answer correctly. The appropriate section is selected
for the particular circumstances of an educational
based on the error diagnosis performed by the student
computer game that aims at teaching students both the
domain of geography and the way to reason about facts
The existence of the virtual companion in the game has
been considered quite important for the promotion of the
In the context of the game, HPR has been used to add
student’s sense of collaboration similarly with a lot of
human-like reasoning abilities to the animated agents that
other recent educational systems. For example, Kay [17]
interact with the students. In particular, when a student is
notes that there is a growing acknowledgment of the
asked a question from the domain of geography, HPR is
importance of the learner’s social context therefore
used to perform error diagnosis in case of an error and to
systems are increasingly being designed for learners
find out how close the erroneous answer has been to the
working in groups of real or simulated peers.
correct one. The outcome of the negotiation process is
experiment. The class were divided into two groups of 8
recorded to the long term student model and is used to
children, group A and group B. The division of children
adapt the presentation of the teaching material to the
into two groups was based on the human teachers’
individual student. Moreover, in case a student asks for
selection of children in such a way that the two groups had
negotiation when s/he is expected to give an answer to a
the same distribution of students having good, average
question in geography, the system employs the inference
mechanism of HPR to evaluate the plausibility of the
Group A was given VR-ENGAGE to work with for two
student’s answer in terms of the model of human
hours. Group B was given an ITS which consisted of the
reasoning that HPR represents. In the negotiation mode,
underlying reasoning mechanisms of VR-ENGAGE but
the student is asked to give explicitly the reasoning for the
had a simple user interface with no game. Both groups
answer that s/he gives and is not certain about.
were told by their human teachers that they had to
For example, the question: “What is the capital
complete a test using the software. In the environment of
town/city of Achaia?” that was mentioned previously,
VR-ENGAGE this meant that they had to open all doors
corresponds to the statement: capital(Achaia)=Patras,
in a virtual world and reach the exit. In the environment of
where “capital” is a descriptor, “Achaia” is an argument
the ITS they had to answer a set of questions, which were
and “Patras” is a referent. Based on HPR, the erroneous
displayed to them in plain text and context. The rules for
answer that the student has given in the example:
the students’ receiving their marks through the software
capital(Achaia)=Rio corresponds to a similarity referent
were the same for both groups. In both applications, the
transform because the two towns belong to Achaia and
mode of negotiation existed. However, in the ITS there
they are similar in terms of the importance of their
was no adventurous context associated with it. Finally,
harbours. Therefore the student’s answer is considered
both groups were supervised by two computer assistants
close to the correct one and the student receives some
who helped them with their interaction with the computer.
marks for his/her answer (although not full marks of
After the children had used the programs, the marks
course). However if the student gives a totally irrelevant
they had obtained and the errors they had made were
answer then s/he does not receive any marks at all.
collected in their user protocols since all their actions had
been recorded. Then, the designers of VR-ENGAGE
5. Evaluation
On average, the students who had used VR-ENGAGE had spent more time with the system than the students who
One important reason for the incorporation of an ITS
had interacted with the ITS. This was partly due to the fact
into a virtual reality game was the objective of making
that there was more to explore in the game therefore
educational software more engaging and motivating than
students needed more time to complete the game.
other forms of software while retaining and even
However, most importantly, it was also partly to the fact
improving the underlying reasoning mechanisms. At a first
that the players of VR-ENGAGE had spent more time
glance, this might look as an obvious achievement of the
reading the lessons that were shown to them than the other
game. However, there may be students who are not used
group of students. This showed that VR-ENGAGE was
to games and thus might not like them in classroom. On
the other hand, the educational game may fall short of the
After the interaction with either of the two systems,
expectations of frequent game players since they may
students were asked again to answer the same test
have high demands for the game environment. Finally
questions where they had originally made a mistake. The
students may be distracted by the game and may not learn
players of VR-ENGAGE remembered the correct answers
from the educational content of the application.
to a higher extent than the other group of students. This
In view of the above, an evaluation of VR-ENGAGE
showed that VR-ENGAGE had achieved its aim of being
has been conducted so that the design assets and
at least as effective as an ITS in the learning outcomes and
deficiencies could be highlighted. The evaluation mainly
was in fact better than the ITS in this respect.
consisted of a comparison between VR-ENGAGE and an
Finally, the interview showed that the players of VR-
ITS with a conventional user interface but with the same
ENGAGE were fascinated by the idea of a game in the
underlying reasoning mechanisms as VR-ENGAGE. This
classroom and they were certainly happier than the other
kind of evaluation was conducted as an experiment, which
group of students. However, most of them also
involved school children and took place in classrooms
spontaneously commented on the game elements before
while human tutors were present but were not actively
they were even asked about them. In general, they pointed
out that the game would be better as a game if it had more
In particular, the experiment involved a class of 16
virtual objects, more background sounds and more
school children of 11-12 years old and two human
adventure. This was due to the fact that most of them were
teachers of this class that were present during the
familiar with commercial virtual reality games therefore
they compared VR-ENGAGE with them and had higher
Garden: Girl’s Responses to Electronic Games”. Journal of Computers in Math and Science Teaching, 13(4), 1994,
The fact that the students who had used VR-ENGAGE
commented on aspects concerning the game itself showed
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6. Conclusions
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Educational applications may benefit from the
technology of virtual reality games, which can increase the
[11] Smith, A., Whitney, H., Thomas, M., Perry, K.,
students’ engagement and motivation. However, one
Brockman, P. “Effect of caffeine and noise on mood,
major problem of this kind of educational application is
performance and cardiovascular functioning.” Human
the construction of the game itself and the connection of
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pedagogy and student adaptivity with the story of the
game. The approach taken in VR-ENGAGE that we
[12] Wolfson, S. & Case, G. “The effects of sound and
described in this paper offers a solution to this problem.
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