Designing and Evaluating Engaging Interfaces for Educational Games

学生的参与对于创造有效的学习体验非常重要。 然而，让数字原生的千禧一代学生参与学习变得越来越具有挑战性。 这一代人可能会发现传统的学校和工作环境与他们通过玩电子游戏沉浸的世界相比很无聊。 为了应对这一日益增长的挑战，游戏已被引入课堂，但在满足教育目标方面表现出好坏参半的结果。 在某种程度上，这可能是由于教育游戏领域的研究工作往往集中在学习任务上，而忽视了用户的游戏体验。 虽然有一些理解是什么可能使娱乐游戏参与，这项研究是脱节的，这些知识大部分未能进入教育领域。 从娱乐游戏中仍然可以学到很多东西，以鼓励学生参与学习。 例如，反馈作为一种鼓励参与的潜在机制，在这方面尚未得到严格的研究。 同样，虽然人们认识到，吸引一个人的东西可能不会吸引另一个人，但这些个体差异尚未得到充分研究和利用，以增强体验。 本提案中概述的研究旨在严格了解视频游戏过程中如何产生参与度，以及如何将其应用于鼓励教育背景下的参与度。 重点是了解不同形式的游戏反馈如何影响不同游戏玩家在不同游戏阶段的参与度。 这项研究的一个主要和新颖的贡献将是开发一种工具，以提高教育游戏参与（TEEGE），将提供教师和设计师的机制，鼓励参与教育游戏，适当匹配反馈与个人特点，在不同阶段的游戏。 因此，将提出具体和经过验证的指导方针（目前缺乏），以帮助开发人员设计鼓励学生参与的教育游戏。

Student engagement is important in creating effective learning experiences. However, it is becoming increasingly challenging to keep the digital-native Millennial generation of students engaged in their learning. This generation may find traditional school and work environments boring when compared to the world they immerse in through playing video games. To address this growing challenge, games have been introduced in the classroom but have shown mixed results in meeting educational objectives. In part, this may be due to the fact that research efforts in the area of educational games often focus on the learning tasks but neglect the user's gameplay experience. While there is some understanding of what may make entertainment games engaging, this research is disjointed and much of this knowledge has failed to make its way into the educational field. There is still much that can be learned from entertainment gaming to encourage engagement in student learning. For example, feedback as a potential mechanism to encourage engagement has not been rigorously studied in this context. Similarly, while there is a realization that what engages one individual may not engage another, these individual differences have not been adequately studied and leveraged to enhance experiences. The research outlined in this proposal looks to rigorously understand how engagement is generated during video gameplay and how this can be applied to encourage engagement within an educational context. The focus is on understanding how different forms of game feedback can influence the antecedents of engagement for different game player characteristics across different stages of gameplay. A major and novel contribution of this research will be the development of a Tool to Enhance Educational Game Engagement (TEEGE) that will provide instructors and designers with a mechanism to encourage engagement with educational games by appropriately matching feedback with individual characteristics at different stages of gameplay. Consequently, specific and empirically-validated guidelines (which are currently lacking) will be proposed to help developers design educational games that encourage engagement amongst students.