Serious Game Framework

A framework targeted at university professors and other educators to create simple Serious Games and let them be played by their students and pupils.

A running instance of the application can be found under here.

Table of Contents

• Features
  • Game
  • Roles
    • Game designers
    • Players
      • Motivation
        • Highscore
        • Badges
        • Experience
    • Administrator
• Installation guide
• Development
• Planned Features
• Contributors
• License

Features

We want to give educators the possibility to create Serious Games including course relevant material for their students, to allow for a refreshing, new teaching and learning experience in the context of the new medium internet. Also, the assessment system for the games can be customized.

The Serious Game Framework consists of four components in the frontend: Play games, View profile as a player or game designer, Design Games and Assessment System.

The second component is a heavily modified version of GLEANER: Game LEarning ANalytics for Educational Research created by Ángel Serrano-Laguna and maintained by the e-ucm eLearning group. GLEANER provides us with an interface to interact with an underlying MongoDB.

As we award certain user actions with badges, we make use of OpenBadges to allow players to push their earned badges to their OpenBadges Backpack.

Game

The concept of the games is rather simple. When entering a game, the player will find four galleries, each filled with tiles containing a keyword of the game's topic. The player has to drag and drop one tile of each gallery into a determined slot in the middle of the screen. Tiles can only be put into their predetermined slot. Upon entering a tile into each slot it is revealed to the player if his answer was correct or not. The inserted tiles are then discarded and the user can continue with the rest of the tiles.

Roles

Game designers

The game designers have full control over the creation of the games. They can create and edit game components like galleries, connections and levels in a game. We started in the context of Medical Education, however the basic concepts of the game could be applied to any topic given the proper tiles and connections.

Learning analytics

After a user has designed a game, he can view statistics to these games on his profile. At the current point of time, statistics can be viewed in pie and bar charts, whereas the created game can be selected through a dropdown menu. In addition, if some levels were solved exceptionally bad (more than 50% wrong answers with more than one answer total), the designer will see a notice on the profile of up to the 10 worst levels. The gives the educator more information about which topics might not have been conveyed as good and require more attention in class.

Players

A user can login via the OpenID Connect button on the top left of the main page. This leads the user to the Learning Layers OIDC page. From here a user can either login or create a new account.

After a game has been created, users can access the game via the main page. If the player is logged in each completed level will save one record to the database along with the result: correct or wrong. The player can then access these statistics and more via his profile page, which is only available if the user is logged in.

Learning analytics

A player can view his saved statistics via the Profile tab on the main page. Statistics are shown per game, so if a player has participated in two games he can set the viewed game via a Dropdown menu. The statistics are shown in a Pie chart by default and can be toggled between the Pie chart and a Bar chart view. Additionally, the top ten (at most) worst levels are shown to the player to reveal learning deficits. A worst level is determined by more than 50% wrong answers with more than one answer in total.

Session Summary

Throughout one's session the statistics are also saved. So when a player wants to close the application window an alert will pop up to show the number of correct and wrong answers for this play session.

Motivation

We have added multiple mechanisms to keep players motivated.

Assessment System

Game designers can create new assessment rules using the Assessment System section. They can customize highscore rules, badges rules and experience rule. Except experience rule which applies to all the games, each game can have a separate highscore rule and game badge that is more suitable for the game. We have set some default values for all the rules which can be customized by game designers according to ther requirements.

Highscore

The highscore is determined by the user's correct and wrong answers and the usage of 'Show Me', 'Try Again' and 'Show Hint' buttons; By default, a correct answer will net the player 5 points, a wrong answer will subtract 2 points, click on 'Show Me' button doesn't effect the score, click on 'Try Again' button adds 2 points and click on 'Show Hint' button deducts 0.5 points from the highscore.

In addition, a player will see the next two (at most) players above him to have an additional motivation, and the two (at most) players beneath him, to see what other players have achieved. To keep the Highscore ladder anonymous (as the players should could know each other from the actual lectures) only the name of the player looking at his profile will be shown. The other positions will be shown as (from top to bottom): "Your next Challenge", "Your next Milestone", "You've beaten this guy", "...and this guy".

Badges

Certain actions can award the player with a Badge. At the moment these actions include:

• A Badge for completing Tutorial game
• Basic Elearner, for clicking the elearning link three times
• Correctemundo, for answering ten levels correctly
• Please Study, for answering a game with more wrong than correct answers

Upon achieving a badge for the first time a sound will be played to support the player's accomplishment. In addition, the user has the possibility to add the Badge to his Mozilla Backpack as we are using the OpenBadges. However, the process of pushing the badge to the backpack is only activated once, namely after earning a badge for the first time. Nevertheless, badges can be earned multiple times, with the exact number appearing next to the badge on the profile. Each time a badge is achieved, badge feedback message is shown on the Game View.

Experience

In addition to the badge system, we have added an experience system to the application. Through his actions each user can earn experience points. By default, the experience is made up as follows:

• 150 points per created game
• 10 points per earned badge
• Highscore
• 1 point per elearning link clicked
• 1 point per more information link clicked
• 0.5 points per login

With his experience a player can rise in his experience level: Each user starts as a Total Noob at level 0, and climbs from Beginner over Experienced Elearner, Professional and Expert to Master. Each level requires more and more experience points and therefore more and more actions from the user. It starts with 100 points to reach Level 1, and then 150 additional points for the next, then 250, then 500 and finally 1000 points for Level 5 Master. Each level is accompanied by an image which gets more and more impressive as the user climbs in level. Additionally an experience bar indicating the users progress can be found on his profile.

Administrator

An administrator (for example a developer) has access to all statistics of all games to see how the application is used.

Installation guide

• Install NodeJS
  • We recommend running v0.10.30, as there are often compatibility problems with node_modules.
  • The module easy-collections depends on this version of Node.
• Install MongoDB
• Go to folder gleaner-frontend within lib folder
  • Install dependencies with npm install
  • Make sure that the node_modules as well as bower_components are installed
• Start the MongoDB server with mongod
• [Create new user in gleaner-frontend node bin/install <username> <password>]
• Start gleaner-frontend with node app/app.js
• [Login]
• Navigate to localhost:3000, where the node application was started
  • Create a new Game
  • Create a new Version for this game
• Copy the Tracking Code to Serious-Game-Framework/lib/gleaner-tracker.js
  • The code line is high up in the file, a comment will mark the correct line
• Copy the first 24 characters of Tracking Code to gleaner_data/lib/traces_.js
  • A comment will mark the correct line
• After changing the configuration, restart the gleaner-frontend server
  • CTRL+C to terminate the server, node app/app.js to restart
• If you want to deploy the code on real server and not work on localhost, you have to point the application to the correct URL. Replace occurrences of localhost:3000 within the code with your real address.
  • 1 occurrence in badge_asserter.js (variable gleaner_frontend_host)
  • 1 occurrence in chart-creator.js
  • 1 occurrence in gleaner-tracker.js (variable gleaner_path)
  • 1 occurrence in serious-game-framework.js (variable gleaner_url)
• The current game data and game rules data is in MySQL database and the players statistics are in MongoDB database. To use this data, create dump files of these databases and import them.

Tests

For testing purposes we use Selenium and NightwatchJS. To execute the tests you need to do the following:

• Install selenium-standalone server and NightwatchJS.
• Start the selenium server with selenium-standalone start
• In your terminal, go to the root of the project and execute all tests with the nightwatch command.
  • To execute single tests nightwatch --test <filename> --testcase "<testcase>"
    • e.g. nightwatch --test tests/selenium-tests.js --testcase "PlayFixedGame"
  • The standard browser for the tests is Chrome. However, we configured the tests to be runnable in Firefox as well. Use the command nightwatch --env firefox to start a Firefox instance.
    • You can configure other browsers by adding them to the nightwatch.json file.

Development

The main files of this project are the serious_game_framework_new.js, which contains the game logic as well as functions to interact with the Gleaner API and build the user profile, and collector.js of the gleaner-frontend module gleaner-data, which contains all functions to calculate the statistics, the highscore and the experience level. The Javascript files in assets/scripts folder contain Game Designer View and Assessmnet System View logic.

Planned Features

We are looking to...

• add an optional division per day for all statistics.
• add more usage statistics for administrators.
• add a possibility to re-add badges to the Mozilla Backpack.
• add more (meaningful) badges.

Contributors

Simon Grubert, Serious Game Framework Base
Marko Kajzer, Learning Analytics and Motivation
Marc Treiber, Badge Design and Realization
Sindhu Aitharaju, Special thanks to the team behind GLEANER.

License

Copyright (c) 2014 Simon Grubert, Marko Kajzer & Sindhu Aitharaju, Advanced Community Information Systems (ACIS) Group, Chair of Computer Science 5 (Databases & Information Systems), RWTH Aachen University, Germany. All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

• Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

• Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

• Neither the name of the {organization} nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.