Tracing a Little for Big Improvements: Application of Learning Analytics and Videogames for Student Assessment

Abstract

Assessment is essential to establish the failure or success of any educational activity. To measure the acquisition of the knowledge covered by the activity and also to determine the effectiveness of the activity itself. The increasing adoption of new technologies is promoting the use of new types of activities in schools, like educational video games that in some cases are developed by the teachers themselves. In this kind of activity, interactivity increases compared to traditional activities (e.g. reading a document), which can be a powerful source of data to feed learning analytics systems that infer knowledge about the effectiveness of the educational process. In this paper, we discuss how a part of the students’ assessment can be achieved semi-automatically by logging the interaction with educational video games. We conclude that even the application of rather simple tracking techniques means an advantage compared to other systems that are fed with less quality data.