Towards a K-12 Game-based Educational Platform with Automatic Student Monitoring: "INTELLIFUN"

Abstract

Since the twenty-first century, digital technologies are increasingly supporting teaching and learning activities. Because learning is effective when it starts early, advanced early years' educational tools are highly recommended to help new generations gain the necessary skills to successfully build opportunities and progress in life. With all the digital learning advances, there are still many problems that teachers, students and parents are facing. Students' learning motivation, problem solving ability remain weak while working memory capacity is found low for children under 11 years old which cause some learning difficulties, such as developmental coordination disorder, mathematics calculation, and language impairments. The latest PISA, Programme for International Assessment, shows that Qatar has seen the lowest scores compared to other countries with similar condition in mathematics, sciences and reading performance and is ranked 63rd of 65 countries involved, even though the Qatari GDP, General government expenditures, is high (OECD 2012). Another problem affecting the educational experience for young children is family engagement. Parents need to be more involved in the learning process and have quick and timely detailed feedback about their children's progress in different topics of study. In fact, the schools days are limited and parents can play an important role in improving their children progress in learning and understanding concepts. The traditional assessment tools provide global grading usually by topics of study (e.g., Algebra). Parents need a grading system by learning skills (e.g., addition facts to 10, solving missing-number problems, subtraction of money) to have a clear view about the specific skills that their children need to improve. Finally, teachers need also an automated skills-based students monitoring tool to observe students' progress in correspondence with the learning objectives to focus on personalized tutoring tactic and take accurate decisions. Such a tool allows the teachers to focus more on the students' weaknesses and take the necessary actions to overcome with these problems. Recent studies showed that students can become more motivated to learn with game-based learning tools. These interactive elements facilitate problem solving and make learning new concepts easier and encourage the students to work harder at school and also at home. Active learning using game-based model guarantees long-term retention of information which help the students increase their exam scores while acquiring the needed skills appropriately. We have conducted a survey and analyzed the features of 31 leading existing technologies in the digital learning industry. We found that only 21 of them offer educational games, 22 are dedicated for elementary age range, 15 offer digital resources to support mathematics and sciences, 11 consider some digital tools for assessment to test children skills and 6 include automated progress reporting engine where most of them need manual data entry support from teachers. There is a need for a complete solution of a game-based learning platform with automatic performance and progress reporting without any manual intervention, and in particular customized to fit with elementary schools curriculum standards.