Jemmali, C., El-Nasr, M. S., &Cooper S. (2022, September). The Effects of Adaptive Procedural Levels on Engagement and Performance in an Educational Programming Game. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games.
adaptive game, programming game, educational game, adaptivity assessment, debugging
Learners’ backgrounds, skills, and knowledge vary as they attempt to learn a new subject. To address this variation and allow learners to progress at their own speed, many researchers are suggesting adaptive learning as a solution. Adaptive content has been successful in learning environments such as intelligent tutoring systems, but it has not been thoroughly researched within video games, especially in terms of adaptive procedural levels. In this paper, we analyze the effects of procedural levels that are generated and inserted at run-time in between pre-designed levels in the educational programming game May’s Journey. Our study with 94 Amazon Mechanical Turkers shows that players encountered fewer code-related errors in the adaptive version, however, their engagement levels were similar, if not slightly higher in the non-adaptive version.