Optimizing student performance in educational games through adapative challenges

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This study will investigate and rigorously evaluate a promising game design approach that involves a sequence of mini-games that are tightly linked to a progression of related scientific concepts. The study will conduct an examination of player behavior in multi-leveled games and two randomized experiments using the PBSKids online user base as the subject pool. The large sample size of the PBSKids online user base provides an exciting opportunity to study design methods and approaches that may have a small but still important effect The research will investigate the intersection of Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow, and consumer game design approaches that produce sustained engagement in computer and video games. The intersection involves the balancing act of creating challenges that are not too difficult so the player-student is frustrated, or too easy so that the student-player is bored while adaptively adjusting the challenge as the player-students ability increases to sustain engagement in the educational challenges.This project promises to be transformative in that good serious game design principles could have an enormous impact on informal science education.