Assessment Design in Learning Games
The challenge of designers of learning games is to always maintain playful engagement and fun while exploring and creating meaning around a concept of topic; however, assessment and accountability will continue to drive education well into the future. Game environments as authentic assessments represent a potential future direction in learning games through powerful design frameworks and emerging tools for collecting and interpreting player data in real time.
The goal of game designers in the immediate future is to build assessment directly into the game experience. Two of the leading learning games research and development centers in the world, the Learning Games Network and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Education Aracade have determined that the next generation of learning games must prioritize the alignment of learning goals and learning standards. They must create ways of identifying how both learners and teachers know what has been learned through the design of the game rather than as add-on assessment instruments like quizzes.
The Radix Endeavour is an example of a game that uses Balanced Design. It is a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) designed for secondary school learning in STEM learning. Players become mathematicians and scientists who embark on quests based on algebra, geometry, ecology, evolution genetics and the human body systems.
Players must make choices based on valid evidence to confound a villain who does not believe in science. At the end of each quest, students myst apply what they have learned to a problem or a new situation.
Their decisions are collected as data and are visible to the teacher and students to determine their understanding of game content though what kind of experiments players are conducting.
Balanced Design
Evidence-Centered Design (ECD) provides such a framework that better aligns the learning goals, tasks and outcomes with the experience of playing a game. Balanced Design uses the structural model of ECD as a design lens that provides designers with a practical means to harmonize 3 critical models: content, task and evidence.
Typically, the evidence model is less developed or even neglected in the design process. Balanced Design requires designers to consider what data and evidence players generate in a game, how they will make use of it to inform further play and what mastery looks like.
The iteration process involves tweaking the content and task models as these types of questions are addressed. Game designers will work with instructional designers, domain experts and assessment specialists throughout this process.
Valuable game play data will be collected through clickstream data using such as the web tools ADAGE that will provide valuable information for teachers, students and game designers in the future.
ADAGE assessment mechanics trace the paths players take through a game and access the player experience. In this way, both direct measures of the content the game is trying to teach and the progression of the player through the game world. The graphic below demonstrates how Balanced Design in integrated into ADAGE in Progenitor X, a zombie-themed puzzle game that introduces stem cell regenerative medicine to middle school students.
Balanced Design Embedded Assessement in ProgenitorX
