A Tool Supported Approach for Teaching Serious Game Learning Analytics

This is an Innovative Practice Full Paper. Serious Game learning analytics can provide insight to improve both the learning process and the lifecycle of games. Due to the complexity and diversity of topics involved, from game design to implementation to tracing the user, teaching game learning analytics to engineering students is challenging. We have created a teaching approach built on an integrated set of tools to minimize the boilerplate setup and configuration typically required when building game learning analytics from disparate modules. Our approach relies on the combination of an authoring environment that eases the creation of adventure and location-based games, a standards-based interaction tracker, and a cloud-based analytics framework. In this environment, students can design and implement serious games with associated analytics models from the very beginning, allowing them to experiment from early on with analytics to improve their games' lifecycles. We have piloted this approach in two university courses for two years, where students prototyped serious games and then used analytics to understand how their users interacted with their games. The use of analytics helped our students to reflect on and refine their designs. While our approach can be applied with any tools, our authoring environment and analytics tools are available as open-source projects to facilitate development, prototyping, or testing of games with analytics.