A simulator’s specifications for studying students’ engagement in a classroom

Abstract

In this paper, we highlight the issues of poor students’ engagement in classrooms and identify the attributes for the environmental settings of a proposed simulator to study the problem of students’ poor engagement from the students’ emotional demotion using agent-based social simulation concepts. The environmental settings of the simulation is classified into environmental factors and emotional factors. The environmental factors consist of a number of students, class session, class duration, type of subject, and year of study, while the emotional factors include the negative emotional states of student (e.g. anger, anxiety or boredom) and the emotional states of lecturers. In this simulation, a lecturer, who might have ideas on new strategies based on their experience, is able to insert a new strategy using a proposed Strategy Specification Settings Interface.