Ideating and Developing a Visualization Dashboard to Support Teachers Using Educational Games in the Classroom

Abstract

Technology has become an integral part of our everyday life, and its use in educational environments keeps growing. Additionally, video games are one of the most popular mediums across cultures and ages. There is ample evidence that supports the benefits of using games for learning and assessment, and educators are mainly supportive of using games in classrooms. However, we do not usually find educational games within the classroom activities. One of the main problems is that teachers report difficulties to actually know how their students are using the game so that they can analyze properly the effect of the activity and the interaction of students. To support teachers, educational games should incorporate learning analytics to transform data generated by students when playing useful information in a friendly and understandable way. For this work, we build upon Shadowspect, a 3D geometry puzzle game that has been used by teachers in a group of schools in the US. We use learning analytics techniques to generate a set of metrics implemented in a live dashboard that aims to facilitate that teachers can understand students’ interaction with Shadowspect. We depict the multidisciplinary design process that we have followed to generate the metrics and the dashboard with great detail. Finally, we also provide uses cases that exemplify how teachers can use the dashboard to understand the global progress of their class and each of their students at an individual level, in order to intervene, adapt their classes and provide personalize feedback when appropriate.

Keywords

• Educational games
• learning analytics
• game-based assessment
• visualization dashboard
• technology-enhanced learning