NO-RPG, a game interface to common core sequenced third-party educational games

Abstract

This work is part of a series of publications on enabling education for children without access to schools, teachers and who have little parental guidance. New estimates by UNESCO reveal that 263 million children and youth are out of school. At the moment there exist no open source free online schools that do not expect a teacher to accompany the student journey. Without a teacher to help, a game environment can provide motivation, sequencing and content. The platform that we have been working on implements the framework for sorting educational games along the US common core standards. The current publication continues this work by adding the game interface that connects the external content with the child. A prototypical Role Playing Game (RPG) allows children to discover third party educational games leveled by grade and subject. The resulting game can be classified as a MOOC because it is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. The result of this work is the open source code of a game and an installed instance that can be used to connect third party games. The next step is to fill the underlying framework with educational games that hook into the various standards and evaluate the game with children.