Assessing Persistence in Educational Games

In this chapter, we describe how assessing persistence in educational games can be useful in enhancing learning. We describe Newton’s Playground (NP), a 2D video game aimed at helping students understand qualitative physics. The goal across all of the 74 puzzles in NP is for the player to guide a green ball to a red balloon. The primary way to move the ball is by drawing on the screen with a mouse. Once objects are drawn they are affected by gravity and Newton’s three laws of motion. We describe results from a study where we mined data from NP log files to develop an in-game measure of persistence and report on how persistence in NP predicts learning gains. Finally, we propose various ways to use the detection of persistence to enhance learning in educational games using the GIFT framework.