Ontological Support for Dynamic Adaptation in Educational Games

Educational games bear a close resemblance to Intelligent Tutoring Systems and narrative centered learning environments since they all use technology to enhance learning, and deliver instructional material to students by leveraging the attractive features of computers, software, and mobile devices. However many DGBL environments fail to balance the game (learning) challenges to the skill level of the student [1]. The difficulty in this adaptation is brought about by the wide variations in the " frustration or patience " level of students; some are frustrated easily and others need more challenges. The insufficient balance between challenges and skill levels exists because of the lack of player profiling from an instructional perspective and also because of the absence of semantic descriptions which give insight into the meaning and usage of the game assets in educational games. [2]. In educational games, players are often modelled from a gaming viewpoint where data is recorded about game events relevant to the players such as points collected, completed levels and rewards found. This information is valuable and makes the game experience more believable; however (educational game) players are for the most part students. Consequently, equal emphasis must be placed on modelling the students' knowledge, their instructional goals, and overall learning achievements. In addition, since all of the learning activities are featured in an educational game as one or more game assets, these activities not only have a pedagogical context but also a gaming context. Therefore, a proper understanding of what the game assets mean and how they fit into the game world along with a detailed student/player model enables the selection of learning activities that are appropriate for use in the game. By using an ontological approach for representing the gaming context in educational games, the relationships between the instructional and gaming roles of the game assets become clearly defined. Few examples of ontologies specifically designed for use in educational games have been described in the literature ([1], [3]). By selecting and combining some of the pure 'gaming' concepts and some of the pure 'instructional' concepts from these ontologies, the game ontology shown in Figure 1 below was developed. The ontology features concepts which describe the gaming environment and the player because in order to adapt the challenges of the game to the player's skill level, a record of the game state that concerns the player must be kept. When a player gives a response to …