Making Understandable Game Learning Analytics for Teachers

Abstract

When used for education, games can increase students’ motivation and engagement and provide a more authentic learning environment where they can apply knowledge, making them especially suited to schools. However, actual application of such (serious) games in schools is still limited. Teachers still consider that using games is a complex process that they do not fully master and that requires extra effort from them. We consider that simplifying teachers’ tasks when deploying games is crucial to promote their use. In classroom scenarios, teachers can greatly benefit from knowing what is happening as a serious game is being played. Game learning analytics (GLA) is the process of collecting, analyzing and displaying student interaction data with the games to improve the educational experience. GLA can be used both at real-time, providing teachers with information while their students are still playing, and offline, inspecting already-finished game sessions. In both cases, analytics is only useful when it manages to bridge the gap between large collections of interaction data and pedagogically sound insight. Analytics dashboards should therefore provide not only complete but meaningful and easy-to-understand information, considering that teachers will most probably not know all the details of the analyses performed underneath. In this paper, we review our experiences on game learning analytics dashboards for teachers, and describe some of the steps we have taken to improve our dashboards.