Ibtissem Daoudi

Abstract For several years, there has been growing interest in the development and use of serious games to improve individuals’ quality of life and behavior. In particular, Crisis Management Serious Games (CMSG) have shown their potential for teaching people both technical and soft skills related to managing crises in a safe environment while reducing training costs. To improve their effectiveness, several evaluation approaches of CMSGs have been proposed. However, despite its interest, the learner’s emotional state is often neglected. As a result, learners may end up with a deep frustration or boredom. Therefore, we propose an Educational Data Mining (EDM) approach to evaluate learners’ affective states in collaborative CMSGs. This approach is applied to assess learners’ engagement during a game-based evacuation scenario aiming to train and to raise awareness among students of a university on evacuating the present persons during a fire emergency situation. The experimental results confirm the major predictions of learners’ affective dynamics and uncover novel findings namely the presence of transitions from boredom to frustration and from frustration to confusion. Our study shows that combining gaming and emotion aspects under an EDM approach to evaluate CMSGs is interesting since it gives reliable results in a less invasive way.

For several years, there has been growing interest in the development and use of serious games to improve individuals’ quality of life and behavior. In particular, Crisis Management Serious Games (CMSG) have shown their potential for teaching people both technical and soft skills related to managing crises in a safe environment while reducing training costs. To improve their effectiveness, several evaluation approaches of CMSGs have been proposed. However, despite its interest, the learner’s emotional state is often neglected. As a result, learners may end up with a deep frustration or boredom. Therefore, we propose an Educational Data Mining (EDM) approach to evaluate learners’ affective states in collaborative CMSGs. This approach is applied to assess learners’ engagement during a game-based evacuation scenario aiming to train and to raise awareness among students of a university on evacuating the present persons during a fire emergency situation. The experimental results confirm ...

Recently, Crisis Management Serious Games (CMSG) have proved their potential for teaching both technical and soft skills related to managing crisis in a safe environment while reducing training costs. In order to improve learning outcomes insured by CMSGs, many works focus on their evaluation. Despite its great interest, the learner emotional state is often neglected in the evaluation process. Indeed, negative emotions such as boredom or frustration degrade the learning quality since they frequently conduct to giving up the game. This research addresses this gap by combining gaming and affect aspects under an Educational Data Mining (EDM) approach to improve learning outcomes. Therefore, we propose an EDM-based multimodal method for assessing learners' affective states by classifying data communicated in text messaging and facial expressions. This method is applied to assess learners' engagement during a game-based collaborative evacuation scenario. The obtained assessment r...

Over the last few decades, interest has grown in the use of serious games (SG) and their assessment in almost every sector. A privileged application domain of SG is crisis management (CM) in which these tools improve crisis behavior and/or management in a safe environment while reducing training costs. However, it is difficult to characterize and evaluate such specific SG. This article proposes a comprehensive grid defining features for description, analysis and evaluation of Crisis Management Serious Games (CMSG). First of all, the authors introduce SG, CM as well as evaluation and assessment concepts, and discuss their particular challenges by highlighting the need of using assessment and evaluation techniques to support learning and/or training. Then, the authors present, classify and compare the most relevant techniques dedicated to address this need by encompassing the state of the art of learners' assessment and evaluation approaches used in CMSG. Finally, this article pre...

In recent years, the rapid development in information and communication technologies has provided the learning field with a variety of new teaching methods to motivate students and improve their skills. Serious Game (SG) is an example of these new forms of learning which constitutes an attractive way supposed to replace the classical boring courses. However, the use of SGs in classroom teaching is still limited since the choice of the adapted SG to a specific learning environment remains a challenging task that makes teachers unwilling to adopt this concept.Face to this finding, our aim is to propose a multi-agent-based simulator to predict the effect of a SG adoption in a learning environment given several game and players characteristics. As results, the simulator gives intensities of several emotional aspects characterizing learners reactions to the SG adoption. Experimentation demonstrates that the results given by the proposed tool are close to real feedbacks. This work is supposed to encourage the use of SGs by giving an expectation of its impact on e-learning processes.