(S. Retalis) Creating Adaptive e-Learning Board Games for School Settings Using theELG Environment

Abstract: The use of digital games in education is well documented in the literature. They have been used in preschool, K-12, the university. A specific type of digital games is board games. Adding board games to the educational process can lead to an interactive stimulating learning experience. With a board game, players often learn from one another while at the same time having fun in a competitive environment. In this paper we propose the "ELG" game, an e-learning board game that adopts the basic elements of a racing board game but fosters students creativity, problem-solving skills, and imagination as students are trying to reach the end by improving their performance in a variety of learning activities. The innovative feature of the ELG is that it offers an adaptive authoring tool that enables teachers to customize their games according to the needs, interests and motives of students. The teacher enters hierarchically categorized learning activities according to the learning goals of a course, sets the rules and assesses the learning progress easily and simply. Students participate in a discovery or exploration trying to reach the goals. After attaining them their level of activities is upgraded and they are challenged to reach the next learning goal. The dice in ELG is not randomized but controlled by the teachers in order that they can customize adaptive learning rules. The educational benefits of exploiting ELG in the learning process is that the teacher can define the levels of difficulty according to the students needs and interests, facilitate and monitor the learning rate of each student, combine a variety of evaluation techniques, and address potential learning problems in a timely manner.

Keywords: adaptive environments, authoring tools, e-learning, game based learning

Categories: L.2.0, L.2.1, L.2.2, L.3.0, L.3.4, L.5.1