Integrating learning analytics into a game authoring tool

Abstract

Educational games can greatly benefit from integrating support for learning analytics. Game authoring tools that make this integration as easy as possible are therefore an important step towards improving adoption of educational games. We describe the process of integrating full support for game learning analytics into uAdventure, a serious game authoring tool. We argue that such integrations greatly systematize, simplify and reduce both the cost and the knowledge required to apply analytics to serious games. In uAdventure, we have used an analytics model for serious games and its supporting implementation as a xAPI application. We describe how player interactions are automatically traced, and provide an interaction-model-trace table with the general game traces that are generated by the editor. Also, we describe the custom editors that simplify the task of authoring game-dependant analytics. Thanks to these integrated analytics, games developed with uAdventure provide detailed tracking information that can be sent to a cloud analytics server, to be analyzed and visualized with dashboards that provide game developers and educators with insights into how games are being played.