Talk:Games as learning motivation

Automatic switching

There may be several problems with arcade/action games as learning motivation:

Badly integrated exercises

An exercise may appear much less interesting than the game phase in between, so the child could see the education as a very undesirable interrupt. A trick to counter that effect could be the use of game effects during the exercise. A child playing XBast as the game phase may receive an XBlast character as a tutor during the exercise. This could change dynamically with the selected game(s).

Out of exercises

A child may still enjoy playing the game but may be out of unsolved exercises (exercises previously determined by teachers, tutors or mentors). A selection of Wikipedia articles appropriate for children (e.g. [1]) could be a nearly unlimited resource of easy exercises that would require the child to answer questions about the article in a multiple-choice cloze (some gaps could require typing an answer instead of selecting one from the list, "none of the above"). It seems easy to collect a large amount of questions for each article, from which a selection algorithm could chose 5 to 10 questions which had not yet been asked or asked seldomly and 1 or 2 questions that had been answered correctly and 1 or 2 questions that had been answered incorrectly in the past.

Inadequate duration of exercise or game phase

A child could influence the length of the exercises or game phases with six different levels of difficulty: (no games, short games, medium, short exercises, few exercises, short and few exercises). The recorded settings over time could also provide some feedback to mentors and teachers.

Game control

A game could receive input from a "game scheduler" while running and gradually become less interesting when certain configurable (e.g. age dependent) limits were exceeded. This way games could be programmed to make a child lose interest, at least for the time being. Other games started as a substitute could start in a more interesting state but then more quickly change to a less interesting state. A child may be more easily prepared to accept the hints given by the game itself than requests from others.