Michael Kickmeier

• St.Gallen University of Teacher Education

Dieser Beitrag beleuchtet kompetenzbasierte Wissensräume als Grundlage digitaler Plattformen für förderorientierte Kompetenzdiagnostik im Mathematikunterricht. Diese ermöglichen eine feingranulare Abbildung individueller Lernstände und Lernwege, die in netzwerkartige Strukturen visualisiert werden können. Im Vortrag wird anhand des Projekts SaTiM e...

In Serious Games, in particular in learning and training games, the assessment of competencies and skills is crucial for monitoring learning progress, tailoring learning experiences, and providing individual formative feedback. A sound psychometric diagnostic of competencies is not trivial, however. Conventional scoring techniques have severe short...

In January 2020, the World Health Organization reported the first infections with the Covid-19 virus in Europe. To control the infections, schools all across the world, including Switzerland, were closed. As a result, students in Switzerland were in distance education for eight weeks – a short time compared to other countries. The school closures h...

Suppose you developed a blended learning concept, also known as “flipped classroom”, where your students can access content and continue learning at home, in addition to learning in a classroom. Now you just finished this course for the first time using the Moodle platform, and you would like to revise how it went and what aspects could still be im...

Among trending topics that can be investigated in the field of educational technology at present—Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), Open Educational Resources (OERs), wearables, and so on—there is a high demand for using educational data to improve the whole learning and teaching cycle, from collecting and estimating students’ prior knowledge of...

The amount of digital data about learning-related activities and achievements is steadily increasing. Yet, it is very difficult to combine all this data and to visualize learning patterns, even when data is readily available. The challenge is that data is gathered from various sources and might be stored in completely different formats. Therefore,...

Informal learning activities, like searching for information on the Internet, can enhance students’ learning. However, not everything we find on the Internet is factual. If teachers could understand where the students look for information during their course, they could help them improve the quality of their informal learning through the Internet....

Nowadays, teachers often use digital platforms to support their face-to-face activities in the classroom. This can spice up the teaching or facilitate learning activities from home. After using such platforms, it could be interesting and beneficial to visualize the students’ actions to better understand the patterns in the students’ learning and pe...

Many stakeholders, including educators, researchers, university administrators, and others might be interested in implementing learning analytics solutions, but they have only limited experience with it, lack the technical expertise or funding, or simply don’t know where to begin. This cookbook brings learning analytics a step closer to educators,...

Misuse of students’ data may cause significant harm. Educational institutions have always analyzed their students’ data to some extent, but earlier that data was stored locally and in analog form. The digital revolution has led to more data being generated, stored, and linked, and more conclusions drawn from it. These new possibilities demand a new...

This book offers an introduction and hands-on examples that demonstrate how Learning Analytics (LA) can be used to enhance digital learning, teaching and training at various levels. While the majority of existing literature on the subject focuses on its application at large corporations, this book develops and showcases approaches that bring LA clo...

Virtual reality applications in education are becoming more and more frequent. Empirical, data-based insights in the mechanisms and impacts of VR trainings are still sparse, however. With this quasi-experimental investigation, we compare the effects of a VR training game with a conventional face-to-face presence workshop in the field of vocational...

The success of serious games usually depends on their capabilities to engage learners and to provide them with personalized gaming and learning experiences. Therefore, it is important to equip a game, as an autonomous computer system, with a certain level of understanding about individual learning trajectories and gaming processes. AI and machine l...

AI follows the notion of human intelligence which is unfortunately not a clearly defined term. The most common definition given by cognitive science as mental capability, includes, among others, the ability to think abstract, to reason, and to solve problems from the real world. A hot topic in current AI/machine learning research is to find out whe...

Recent advances in automatic machine learning (aML) allow solving problems without any human intervention. However, sometimes a human-in-the-loop can be beneficial in solving computationally hard problems. In this paper we provide new experimental insights on how we can improve computational intelligence by complementing it with human intelligence...

Learning Analytics is an important trend in education. In conventional classroom settings, however, a sound basis of digital data for analytics is lacking. Therefore, it is important to develop the methodologies and technologies to utilize the scattered and heterogeneous bits of available data as effective as possible. It is also important to deplo...

Learner models are a key element of many intelligent computer-based assessment and training approaches. Oftentimes, these models, the processes, and evidences are hidden from the learners and even teachers. Open learner models (OLM) are intended to make the underlying logic of a model as well as the evidences that contributed to a certain student a...

Diese DIN SPEC wurde im Zuge des PAS-Verfahrens durch einen Workshop (temporäres Gremium) erarbeitet. Die Erarbeitung und Verabschiedung des Dokuments erfolgte durch die im Geschäftsplan genannten Verfasser. Diese DIN SPEC soll das Beschreibungsformat für "Serious Games" definieren. Unter dem Begriff "Serious Games" versteht man digitale Spiele, di...

Much has been written about the theoretical potential of digital games to transform teaching and learning and to offer new forms of digital assessment; yet the education system in the United Kingdom (UK) is arguably still focused exclusively on the assessment and reward of individual effort and achievement. This can be at odds with the requirements...

Learning Analytics is a melting pot for a multitude of research fields and origin of many developments about learning and its environment. There is a serious hype over the concepts of learning analytics, however, concrete solutions and applications are comparably scarce. Of course, data rich environments, such as MOOCs, come with statistical analyt...

This chapter contains an introduction to this book which aims at providing guidance to people who are interested in conducting or dealing with research in the area of entertainment computing and serious games. The chapter starts with defining key terminology. It then illustrates benefits and challenges in this area of research by discussing the dev...

The benefits of Open Learner Model for learners have been widely demonstrated: supporting learning and metacognition, facilitating self-monitoring and planning, improving self-assessment skills… In this paper, we investigate the benefits of using an OLM for teachers. 10 teachers have been using the OLM in order to monitor their class in the context...

Creating entertainment games is always an interdisciplinary effort, and becomes even more pronounced when serious game creation involves experts from a specific subject area or supporting disciplines, such as pedagogy. As these experts can come from almost any discipline, it is beneficial for interdisciplinary work to appreciate differences in appr...

In every digital game, players both act in and interact with the game. They use the options of game mechanics to achieve goals. For example, players move a controller to steer the motions of an avatar, or they press buttons to trigger certain actions. These actions and interactions lead to certain results like a successful finish of a quest, solvin...

Serious games are fascinating, not only as a popular research field, but also as a relevant economic factor for the prospering game industry. The use of advanced gaming concepts and game technology applied to non-leisure contexts (e.g., education, training, health) is a logical and promising approach, but acceptance by the gaming industry itself (g...

With the arrival of 'big data; in education, the potential was recognised for learning analytics to track students' learning, to reveal patterns in their learning, or to identify at-risk students, in addition to guiding reform and supporting educators in improving teaching and learning processes [1]. Learning Analytics dashboards have been used at...

To find a balance between learning analytics research and individual privacy, learning analytics initiatives need to appropriately address ethical, privacy, and data protection issues. A range of general guidelines, model codes, and principles for handling ethical issues and for appropriate data and privacy protection are available, which may serve...

The aim of this book is to collect and to cluster research areas in the field of serious games and entertainment computing. It provides an introduction and gives guidance for the next generation of researchers in this field. The 18 papers presented in this volume, together with an introduction, are the outcome of a GI-Dagstuhl seminar which was hel...

In computerized assessment of knowledge it is important to quickly estimate the competence state of a testee. This is particularly true for digital educational games where this kind of assessment has to be done in a non-invasive way, i.e., by avoiding any queries or interruptions. This paper presents the mathematical foundation of a model by which...

Gamification is a recent trend in the field of game-based learning that accounts for development effort, costs, and effectiveness concerns of games. Another trend in educational technology is learning analytics and formative feedback. In the context of a European project the developed a light weight tool for learning and practicing divisions named...

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a set of practices for architectural design of software that exploits services as loosely coupled components orchestrated to deliver various functionalities. The SOA paradigm is not well established in the Serious Games (SG) domain, but it is expected to provide benefits, particularly in reducing the conceptua...

Serious Games (SGs) have a lot of potential in education, possibly making learning more engaging and satisfying. Adaptive Games strive to keep the challenges presented by the game balanced with the player’s abilities, as to keep the player in the “flow” state. We have used a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach to develop a simple adaptive...

Gamification is a recent trend in the field of game-based learning that accounts for development effort, costs, and effectiveness concerns of games. Another trend in educational technology is learning analytics and formative feedback. In the context of a European project the developed a light weight tool for learning and practicing divisions named...

The uptake of information and communication technologies in the classrooms is a key trend over the past years and decades. Teachers are using Moodle courses, e-Portfolios, Google Docs, perhaps learning games or virtual worlds such as OpenSim for educational purposes. A second trend pushes towards a formatively inspired assessment and feedback, ofte...

The challenge of educational game design is to develop solutions that please as many players as possible, but are still educationally effective. How learning happens in games is methodologically very challenging to point out and thus it is usually avoided. In this paper we tackle this challenge with eye tracking method. The aim of this research is...

Gamification appears being a promising approach to utilize the strong motivational potential of “gaming” in classroom without suffering from shortcomings such as low efficiency, weak pedagogy, or maybe most importantly the high costs. In the context of a European project we developed a rather light weight tool for learning and practicing multiplica...

With the increase of ICT in classrooms comes much data that can be used for evidence-based assessment. We focus on harnessing and interpreting this data to empower teachers in formative assessment. We describe e-assessment of English as a Second Lan-guage and illustrate how we move from data collected in classroom activities, through an automated a...

This paper draws on visualisation approaches in learning analytics, considering how classroom visualisations can come together in practice. We suggest an open learner model in situations where many tools and activity visu-alisations produce more visual information than can be readily interpreted.

This paper introduces several activity visualisations and competency-based open learner model views, suggesting that a competency approach can help teachers in their use of such data. We present examples from Next-TELL.

With the range of educational tools available it is now realistic for learner models to take account of broader information, and there are strong arguments for placing open learner models in the centre of environments with diverse sources of data [1],[2],[3]. This Interactive Event will demonstrate the Next-TELL approach to facilitating teachers’ u...

Competence-based Knowledge Space Theory (CbK5T) has been proven to be a very well-fitting basis for realizing personalization in technology-enhanced learning. Especially in the area of game-based learning, however, some extensions and improvements are needed. Personalization in a serious game cannot be regarded simply as the selection of game asset...

This paper explores the relation between problem solving learning environments (PSLEs) and assessment concepts. The general framework of evidence-centered assessment design is used to describe PSLEs in terms of assessment concepts, and to identify similarities between the process of assessment design and of PSLE design. We use a recently developed...

The deployment rate of serious games (SGs) in higher education (HE) and their proper insertion in meaningful curricula isstill quite low. There is a lack of papers in literature describing deployment of SGs for HE in detail, critically showing educational benefits, and providing guidelines and best practices on their use. With the present work, we...

Educational computer games are a highly popular but also a highly challenging field when it comes to an effective and efficient adoption in the classrooms. This holds true from the perspective of the necessary technical infrastructure, from the pedagogical embedment as well as the perspective of a meaningful and formative use of individual gaming r...

Virtual worlds in education, intelligent tutorial systems, and learning analytics – all these are current buzz words in recent educational research. In this paper we introduce ProNIFA, a tool to support theory-grounded learning analytics developed in the context of the European project Next-Tell. Concretely we describe a log file analysis and prese...

Learning analytics refers to the process of collecting, analyzing, and visualizing (large scale) data about learners for the purpose of understanding and pro-actively optimizing teaching strategies. A related concept is formative assessment – the idea of drawing information about a learner from a broad range of sources and on a competence-centered...

One of the trump cards of digital educational games is their enormous intrinsic motivational potential. Although learning game design is often understood on a one-fits-all level, the actual motivational strength of an educational game strongly depends on the individual learners, their very specific goals, preferences, abilities, strength and weakne...

With the increase of ICT in classrooms comes much data that can be used for evidence-based assessment. We focus on harnessing and interpreting this data to empower teachers in formative assessment. We describe e-assessment of English as a Second Language and illustrate how we move from data collected in classroom activities, through an automated as...

The demands of galloping societal changes and technical (r)evolutions on today's learners are immense. At present we need empower people to solve problems we do not even know yet. This requires a substantial change of education, away from teaching knowledge towards teaching meta-skills such as problem solving, non-linear thinking, creativity, or co...

The 21st century is challenging the future educational systems with ‘twitch-speed’ societal and technological changes. The pace of (technological) innovations forces future education to fulfill the need of empowering people of all societal, cultural, and age groups the acquire competences and skills in real-time for demands and tasks we cannot even...

MATE is an intelligent tutorial system that is supposed to combine innovative pedagogical techniques from the field of coaching and to provide intelligent technological solutions for support the coaching processes in an autonomous and smart way. Conceptually, the system is composed of two distinct components, an afferential component that is 'harve...

The aging of the population is a serious challenge for the medical and social insurance systems in the 21st century. The continuously increasing average age leads to an increase of physical and cognitive frailty, which in turn, leads to substantial medical costs and costs for caring. Thus, frailty is increasingly recognized as a highly prevalent pr...

A key factor for the success and efficacy of an educational medium is the extent to which it is capable of addressing the preferences, abilities, strengths, weaknesses, and goals of individual learners. Research in the field of learning and instruction has demonstrated in the past that one on one tutoring is the most effective and powerful way of t...

Educational computer games are a highly popular but also a highly challenging field where (technology-enhanced) education meets entertainment/ gaming. Ongoing endeavors concentrate on the need to translate the state-of-the-art in conventional e-learning, this regards in particular to technologies of intelligent and adaptive tutoring, to educational...

Computer games are undoubtedly an enormously successful genre. Over the past years, a continuously growing community of researchers and practitioners made the idea of using the potential of computer games for serious, primarily educational purposes equally popular. However, the present hype over serious games is not reflected in sound evidence for...

The assessment of knowledge and learning progress in the context of game-based learning requires novel, noninvasive, and embedded approaches. In the present paper, we introduce a mathematical framework which relates the (problem solution) behavior of a learner in the game context to the learner's available and lacking competencies. We argue that a...

The popularity of computer games has lead to an increasing interest in educational games in research and development in the last decades. Educators as well as technicians are captivated of the idea of utilizing the motivational potential and the rich virtual worlds of today’s computer games. To use the full educational potential of computer games a...

One of the trump cards of digital educational games is their enormous intrinsic motivational potential. Although learning game design is often understood on a one-fits-all level, the actual motivational strength of an educational game strongly depends on the individual learners, their very specific goals, preferences, abilities, strength and weakne...

Educational computer games are a highly popular but also a highly challenging field where (technology-enhanced) education meets entertainment/gaming. On-going endeavours concentrate on the need to translate the state-of-the-art in conventional e-learning, this regards in particular to technologies of intelligent and adaptive tutoring, to educationa...

The paper presents an empirical study with a digital educational game (DEG) called 80Days that aims at teaching geographical content. The goal of the study is twofold: (i) investigating the potential of the eye-tracking approach for evaluating DEG; (ii) studying the issue of vicarious learning in the context of DEG. Twenty-four university students...

A major advantage of educational computer games is seen in their enormous intrinsic motivational potential. However, exploiting this potential can only occur with a very strong consideration of individual states, traits, and preferences. A crucial role in this respect plays the attempt to provide individual learners/gamers with appropriate personal...

Software that intelligently interprets the goals and needs of its users on the basis of their behaviors without interrupting the work flow and consequently disturbing concentration and software that can support the users in a personalized, smart, yet unostentatious way is a desirable vision, for sure. One attempt to such support system was Microsof...

The idea of utilizing the rich potential of today's computer games for educational purposes excites educators, scientists and technicians. Despite the significant hype over digital game-based learning, the genre is currently at an early stage. One of the most significant challenges for research and development in this area is establishing intellige...

Educational computer games are presently a hot topic in research and development. The idea of utilizing the motivational potential and the rich virtual worlds of today's computer games is teasing educators as well as technicians. Fully exploiting the educational potential of computer games requires a strong personalization and adaptation to the ind...

Research on the influence of gender on attitudes towards and performance in digital educational games (DEGs) has quite a long history. Generally, males tend to play such games more engagingly than females, consequently attitude and performance of males using DEGs should be presumably higher than that of females. This paper reports an investigation...

Digital Educational Games offer immersive environments through which learners can enjoy motivational and compelling educational experiences. Applying personalization techniques within these games can further enhance the educational potential, but the often realtime and narrative-driven focus of games presents many challenges to traditional adaptati...

Computer games are tremendously successful and this is why the potential of using this medium for educational purposes is increasingly recognized and researched. However, as new learning technologies need to be appropriate for all students and ensure equal learning opportunities, it is important to take into account evidences on gender differences...

Three major challenges for developing and evaluating immersive digital educational games (DEGs) are identified, including (i) improving adaptive technologies, especially digital storytelling, to shape learning experience; (ii) providing technological approaches to reduce developments costs for DEGs, and (iii) developing robust evaluation methodolog...

The present paper introduces the 80Days project, an inter-disciplinary European research project endeavoring after pushing the state-of-the-art in digital educational games. The main objectives of the project are enabling curriculum-related education with competitive computer games, realizing non-invasive and educationally meaningful support of the...

Using computer games for educational purposes is a fascinating idea that is getting increasingly popular amongst educators, researchers, and developers. From a technical as well as psycho-pedagogical viewpoint, today's educational games are at an early stage. Most products cannot compete with non-educational, commercial games and not with conventio...

The main goal of our project 80Days is to develop cost-effectively an immersive digital educational game (DEG) to enable learning with fun and pleasure. The domain selected for the game is geography, given its broad range and rich cartographic material. In this paper, we first illustrate how the game concept of 80Days can well exemplify the four th...

ObjectiveSince simulations are often accepted uncritically, with excessive emphasis being placed on technological sophistication at the expense of underlying psychological and educational theories, we evaluated the learning performance of simulation software, in order to gain insight into the proper use of simulations for application in medical edu...

In this study, it was investigated whether, and to what extent, Web 2.0 technologies, actually Weblogs, can be a suitable instrument for enhancing the practice of distributed learning. In educational settings, which are based on traditional lectures many students begin serious study shortly before the exam. However, from previous empirical research...

Educational computer games are sometimes considered to be moti-vating per se – because of the playing activity -and do not require further moti-vational strategies. Therefore the concept of 'flow experience' is commonly used to describe how smooth gaming naturally results in deep engagement and, consequently, enhanced learning. Learning with an ins...

Computer games are extremely successful and popular – and the potential of using this medium for educational purposes is increasingly recognised and researched. To keep the engaging character of a computer game, an educational game needs to appropriately contextualise learning activities in the game and its narrative in order to retain flow and eng...

Using computer games for educational purposes is a compelling idea that is increasingly adopted by researchers, developers, and educators. Still, digital educational games are at an early stage. A crucial factor that must be increasingly addressed by future research is a personalization of learning and gaming experiences in the rich virtual worlds...

Computer games are an incredibly successful technology; due to the dynamic and active nature they are perhaps even more successful and appealing than TV or movies. Facing this success and the significant amount of time young people spend on playing computer games, it is a compelling idea of educators, developers, and researchers to utilize this tec...

In this paper, we describe a conceptual framework and address the related issues and solutions in the identification of three major challenges for the development and evaluation of Immersive Digital Educational Games (IDEGs). These challenges are (i) advancing adaptive educational technologies to shape learning experience, ensuring the individualiz...

Wikis are a website technology for mass collaborative authoring. Today, wikis are increasingly used for educational purposes. Basically, the most important asset of wikis is free and easy access for end users: everybody can contribute, comment and edit—following the principles of Universal access. Consequently, wikis are ideally suited for collabor...

The developmental course in the distance–speed–time domain is still a matter of debate. Traditional stage models are contested by theories of continuous development and adaptive thinking. In the present work, we introduce a formal framework for modelling the developmental course in this domain, grounding on Competence-based Knowledge Space Theory....

With the increasing use of dynamic media in multimedia learning material, it is important to consider not only the technological but also the cognitive aspects of its application. A large amount of previous research does not provide preference to either static or dynamic media for educational purposes and a considerable number of studies found posi...

Most existing educational games cannot compete with their non-educational counterparts in terms of visual and narrative quality, gameplay, or adaptability. Amongst the most advanced approaches is ELEKTRA, a European project that developed a framework for intelligent educational personalization, enabling games to adapt learning and gaming activities...

A crucial factor for successful digital educational games, particularly for older children and adolescents, is an appropriate balance; balance between learning and gaming and balance between challenge and ability. These factors are important to maintain fun, immersion, flow experience, and motivation – the motivation to play and therefore to learn....

This paper presents a three-round user strategy (EPM), extending the C implementation of Brent’s PRAXIS algorithm by Gegenfurtner. In a first round, EPM applies a multistart procedure for global optimization, randomly generating and evaluating multiple sets of start values drawn from weighted primary and secondary intervals. Using the parameter est...

There is little doubt that intelligent and adaptive educational technologies are capable of providing personalized learning experiences and improving learning success. Current challenges for research and development in this field concern, for example, the design of comprehensive data models for adaptive systems as well as the interoperability of s...

The intrinsic motivation to play, and therefore to learn, that might be provided by digital educational games teases researchers and developers. However, existing educational games often fail in their attempt to compete with commercial games and to provide successful learning. Often some learning is added to digital games or some gameplay is added...

Most existing educational games cannot compete with their non-educational counterparts in terms of visual and narrative quality, gameplay, or adaptability. Amongst the most advanced approaches is ELEKTRA, a European project targeting on producing a 3D adventure game teaching physics. The project developed a scientifically sound framework for intell...

In our e-Society the concept of Life Long Learning (LLL) is not merely a buzz word but a necessity. Pervasive e-Education is a challenging way to assist both Life Long Learning and Continuing Engineering Education (CEE). However, research in these areas must bridge the gap between Psychology and Computer Science. Furthermore, research and developme...

The basic idea of game-based learning is the fusion of fun and learning by using the motivational potential of video games in the educational context. Thus, the design of an educational game should be adaptive not only to the learner's cognitive abilities, but also to the individual preferences of the player. Especially the design of the non-player...

Abstract Digital game-based ,learning is a ,hot topic of research and development. Since the advent of computer and video games, educators were inherently interested in utilizing the beneficial aspects of computer games for educational purposes. These factors are primarily the intrinsic motivation of games, immersive environments, engaging stories,...

Today, Web 2.0 is one of the most used buzzwords for a conglomerate of technologies within the elearning community. However, these are a new arrangement of standard technologies, the applications of which are primarily motivated by the slogan “the user is the content”. But are Wikis, Blogs, Podcasting etc. actually the great promise for the lea...

Lifelong competence development is a fundamental premise for an information society, as well as major aim and challenge. Facing the variety of learning programs and qualification measures, problems emerge in supporting lifelong learning. Efficient competence development necessitates providing learners with learning opportunities which are appropria...