Towards an ontology-driven game-based educational platform with automatic student monitoring

Abstract

This paper presents a new educational platform for young children. It is based mainly on serious games and semantic web. The platform is used to assess and monitor the children' progress and performance in meeting preset learning objectives without any manual intervention. The learning games are used to improve the children's learning outcomes and keep them motivated. The platform monitoring features allow the teachers to focus on the children' achievement of every learning objective and empower also the parents' engagement in their children's learning experience. In fact, they can follow up the children and know their weaknesses and strengths. A new ontology is proposed to map the programs curriculums and learning objectives with the flow-driven game worlds' elements. The children' performance is evaluated through the ontology using information extraction with an automated reasoning mechanism that is guided by a set of inference rules. The platform is implemented in a 3-tier architecture where mobile game applications are used. These games can query and update the ontology in real time through a web service by invoking data management, reasoning, monitoring and reporting operations using Apache Jena Ontology API. The platform can be used to dynamically generate the content of the games based on the children' preferences and acquired knowledge.