Co-designing Gamified Intelligent Tutoring Systems with Teachers

Abstract

Researchers are increasingly interested in Gamified Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) to provide adaptive instruction and to enhance engagement of students. However, although teachers are demanding to be active users of gamified ITS, they have been not considered as first-class citizens in the design of these kinds of systems. In order to contribute to the active and customized use of gamified ITS by teachers, three technical problems should be considered. First, designing ITS is very complex (i.e., considering different theories, components, and stakeholders) and including gamification may significantly increase such complexity and variability. Second, gamified ITS features can be used depending on several elements (e.g., educational level, knowledge domain, gamification and ITS theories, etc). Thus, it is imperative to take advantage of theories and practices from both topics to reduce the design space of these systems. Third, in order to effectively aid teachers to actively use such systems, it is needed to provide a simple and usable solution for them. To target these problems, in this paper, we present a solution for authoring gamified ITS by teachers that makes use of an ontology-based feature model (OntoSPL) to deal with the variability at runtime and takes advantage of an ontology (GaTO) that connects gamified ITS theories and design practices to constrain the variability space for designing these systems. Our main results indicate that teachers have a high acceptance level (i.e., ease of use, usability, and low complexity) in the design of gamified ITS using the authoring solution, customizing their own gamified tutors in less than five minutes. These results indicate a promising way to explore the use of authoring tools, ontologies, and software engineering to take advantage of both artificial intelligence techniques (mainly for aiding adaptation for students) as well as on the human intelligence of teachers to co-design gamified intelligent tutoring systems.