Intelligent System for Interactive Teaching through Videogames

Abstract

Education, videogames, and intelligent systems are all relevant topics for researchers. Determining means of improving academic performance using a range of techniques and tools is an important challenge. However, while there are currently websites and multimedia resources that help students to improve their knowledge on specific topics, these lack in not having intelligent agents that can evaluate students and recommend materials to suit the difficulty that a user is having in a given subject. In this sense, this paper aims at developing an intelligent system that allows interactive teaching in basic education using videogames. In particular, high school students’ skills in basic mathematical operations with fractions were used for testing experimentally the approach. An intelligent system was developed using computational techniques such as fuzzy logic and case-based reasoning to evaluate user performance and recommend additional study material according to the specific challenges from the given educational game. The use of the games was supported by ICT (information and communication technologies) tools on a web platform. Such a developed platform was tested by 206 high school students, who played 5400 games in total. The students showed an improvement of around 14% in the topics covered. The results indicate that the implementation jointly of videogames and intelligent systems allows users to improve their performance in the given topics.