Escapeling

Contents

1. Paper & Conference Talk
2. IKW website
3. Play-through Video
4. Additional Resources
5. References

Paper & Conference Talk

Conference submission

To wrap up all the improvements of Escapeling that were achieved throughout the second year of the project, we decided to write up these contributions as a paper. To publish the paper, we submitted a session proposal to the Learning Ideas Conference 2022 - the conference where the paper written by the previous cohort of the Escapeling team was also submitted (Johnson, Urazov and Zanoli, 2021)¹. More specifically, we submitted a short abstract proposing a 30-minute talk consisting of a presentation and demo elements from Escapeling. The proposal was submitted to a special track of the conference – the ALICE special track. This is because the focus of the special track matches our application and our reported improvements particularly well, concentrating on chatbots, gamification and technology in online education. The proposal was preliminarily accepted, contingent on the acceptance of the full paper submitted on March 15th, 2022. The proposal abstract can be viewed here.

Framing of the paper

The goal of the paper is to present the contributions to Escapeling made since the last paper was published (Johnson, Urazov and Zanoli, 2021)¹. Specifically, the major contributions which might be interesting to the general public comprise different visualizations of the storyline, a new listening task, an improved storyline, the grammatical error correction (GEC) feature of the discussion task, the updated adaptive module, the new lobby platform, technical game improvements, evaluation and testing of the respective features.
These updates can be grouped into the conceptual classes of user experience (UX) and learning experience updates. Therefore, a framing focusing on novel updates of UX and the learning experience was chosen.

To this end, we write a 12-page long paper. In the learning experience section, we first provide general background about the app and describe existing tasks. We then introduce the novel listening task, and afterwards present the GEC and updated adaptive module. We describe these two updates as contributing to better pedagogical feedback which is an important aspect of an effective learning experience (Russell and Spada, 2006)². We chose this framing because the end-user experience has been improved by providing feedback messages based on the GEC and adaptive module in mandatory tasks in response to user answers (all tasks except the listening task).

In the next section, we describe the lobby platform, the updated storyline and the visualizations. These additions are presented as improvements to the user experience, mostly due to their role in increasing the affective and motivational aspects of engagement in the game. We motivate these by literature showing the role of emotions for learning success and user experience in app design (Norman, 2005;³ Zallio and Damon, 2018)⁴.

We conclude the paper by presenting the evaluation results of the app available at the time of paper submission. These include the testing results gathered during the third semester of the project, as well as the results of three interviews with students of English as a Second Language (ESL) education at Uni Osnabrück and data from 14 other Uni Osnabrück students who played the game and completed end-user questionnaires. While the first and third evaluation strategies focus on user experience and evaluate respective improvements, the interview results provide qualitative insights into the pedagogical value of Escapeling, also in a hypothesized classroom environment.

Upon final acceptance and possible revisions, the paper will be published in the proceedings of the conference.

IKW Website

Motivation

During this last semester, a discussion about the future of the conducted project arose, since there was a will to give the project and the project group the credit it is worth. The project group started to discuss what the actual goal was for the documentation and the coding of the project along with other relevant information. The conclusion for all of the project members was that there was a desire to make the project “alive”, in other words, a will to make the bot and the documentation of the project easily accessible so that there would be a possibility to be inspired by different parts of a project, such as a method or implementation.

As of today, there is no IKW-website where different study projects can display information about the project work so the discussion landed in a working group, who got the assignment to investigate if there was an already existing IKW-website, how it was structured and if different improvements could be done. The project group wanted an attractive website that would be able to give inspiration to someone who might want to make their own proceeding of an already completed project.

Structure of new website

In order to be able to improve the IKW-website, we started to search for existing websites that we found more attractive and appealing and landed in the people section of the neuroinformatic research group at the UOS was a website that we found alluring. Therefore, we started to break down the landing page of the neuroinformatic website, so that we could get an appreciation of how we wanted the new IKW-website to be structured.

On the neuroinformatic website, we pointed out different parts that we thought were of importance and could be implemented on the new website. For example, a box where there was room for an information section and a picture was considered relevant for the new website. Since the existing IKW-website only consists of one box of information, we wanted the new website to have a more functional design where different boxes of information were displayed, in order to make the website more vivid. The structure of the new IKW-website is therefore mainly inspired by the neuroinformatic website at OUS.

Motivation behind the template

After stating the structure for the new website, we started to work on a template for making the re-designing of the website more efficient and to make it easier for different study groups to know what type of information they should address. To be able to construct a template, it felt necessary to state exactly what type of information should be displayed on the website. Therefore, different target groups were established, in order to identify what type of information was needed, for example, one target group was prospective students that wants to inform themselves about previous or potential study projects. We used the what, who and how method and decided on different design aspects, such as that a group photo should be displayed, a section where the goal of the project is described and what the project already has achieved.

Play-through Video

Video could be an easier form to explain and show how the game works. We decided to create a video with a basic explanation of how each of the tasks could be completed, and showcase basic features like adaptive hints. We wanted to make the video short, descriptive and appealing for a viewer to try it out. Furthermore, we make the narrative of the video in such a way that it feels like an advertisement.

We recorded ourselves playing the game starting from the lobby to show how one can find a partner to play the game. We also recorded each possible case, like what happens when one fails the task, completes the task and gives wrong answers in between. This way, we can showcase the features of the game in each task.

Additional Resources

Here you can find some links to the outcomes of this study project: If you have telegram installed, check out our telegram bot! To find other players to play the game with, enter our lobby platform. Have a look at our study project among other study projects of the University of Osnabrück at the IKW website.

You can find more Info about each topic in their respective sections on this website!

References