SBIR Phase II: A Systematic Approach, Language and Platform for Building and Distributing Interactive Educational Games in Operations Management

SBIR 第二阶段：用于构建和分发运营管理中的互动教育游戏的系统方法、语言和平台

• 批准号: 1738325
• 负责人: Karin Khoo
• 金额: $ 73.93万
• 依托单位: Fathomd, Inc.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-09-15 至 2021-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1738325&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; II; Systematic; Approach

This SBIR Phase II project should increase the adoption of pedagogically validated educational games that facilitate retention and effective use of business concepts taught and relevant to managing organizations. Start-ups, for-profit and nonprofit companies all need managers who can make effective decisions in the face of complexity and uncertainty. It is of the utmost importance to society, therefore, that the next generation of business leaders is equipped with relevant frameworks and tools that supplement traditional teaching methods and enable effective use of knowledge on the job. Hence, this project has the potential to empower the U.S. workforce to be more productive and innovative, which will improve existing business outcomes and thus drive U.S. job and economic growth. Improved business operations will also lead to more profitable business in general and potentially larger tax revenues for the U.S. government. Eventually opening the GDL to third-party authors in the $18.6 billion global game-based learning market will accelerate game innovation and usage in other business and engineering disciplines at a lower cost, which will both enhance the effectiveness of the STEM workforce and encourage more economic activity in the game development market.This project is based on three innovations that differentiate this solution from others: (1) a scientific Game Research and Development (GR&D) process designs games containing pedagogical learning objectives; (2) a Game Design Language (GDL) accelerates implementation of game concepts as automatically validated, domain specific language while eliminating runtime errors; and (3) an innovative web Game Distribution Platform (GDP) minimizes the effort to setup and manage games in the classroom. Typical educational game development in languages such as JavaScript is time-consuming, involves professional software engineers and requires debugging of runtime errors, while usage of game technology in the class is disruptive to the flow of instruction. Such challenges are therefore prohibitive for non-professional programmers and game administrators such as professors. To mitigate the problem of runtime errors, this project employs methods of video game development, which typically use domain-specific languages based on non-Turing-complete models of computation to solve these issues. Games created with GDL will enable rapid new game development and have a guaranteed level of technical quality, allowing professors to focus on pedagogical relevance during instruction. The main technical hurdle is to tailor these methods to result in GDL capable of expressing the Operations Management (OM) games conceived during the scientific GR&D process and playable via the GDP that enables seamless class integration.

这个SBIR第二阶段项目应该增加采用教学验证的教育游戏，促进保留和有效使用的商业概念教和相关的管理组织。初创企业、营利性和非营利公司都需要能够在复杂性和不确定性面前做出有效决策的管理者。因此，为下一代商业领袖配备相关的框架和工具，以补充传统的教学方法，并使知识在工作中得到有效利用，这对社会至关重要。因此，该项目有可能使美国劳动力更具生产力和创新力，这将改善现有的业务成果，从而推动美国的就业和经济增长。商业运营的改善也将带来更有利可图的业务，并可能为美国政府带来更大的税收收入。最终，在价值186亿美元的全球基于游戏的学习市场中，GDL向第三方作者开放将加速游戏创新，并以更低的成本在其他商业和工程学科中使用，这将提高STEM劳动力的效率，并鼓励游戏开发市场中更多的经济活动。该项目基于三项创新，使该解决方案与其他解决方案不同：（1）科学的游戏研发（GR& D）流程设计包含教学学习目标的游戏;（2）游戏设计语言（GDL）加速游戏概念的实现，作为自动验证的特定领域语言，同时消除运行时错误;（3）创新的网络游戏分发平台（GDP）最大限度地减少了在课堂上设置和管理游戏的工作。用JavaScript等语言进行的典型教育游戏开发非常耗时，涉及专业软件工程师，并且需要调试运行时错误，而在课堂上使用游戏技术会破坏教学流程。因此，这种挑战对于非专业程序员和游戏管理员（如教授）来说是禁止的。为了减轻运行时错误的问题，该项目采用了视频游戏开发的方法，这些方法通常使用基于非图灵完备计算模型的特定领域语言来解决这些问题。使用GDL创建的游戏将使新游戏的快速开发成为可能，并具有有保证的技术质量水平，使教授能够在教学过程中专注于教学相关性。主要的技术障碍是定制这些方法，以使GDL能够表达在科学GR D过程中构思的操作管理（OM）游戏，并通过GDP进行播放，从而实现无缝的类集成。