Assessing an Authoring Tool for Meta-Design of Serious Games

Abstract : In order to help teachers to adopt serious games, we explore the problem of applying the meta-design principles to this context. The goal of meta-design is to enable end-users to act as designers as well as at design stage than at use time. We focused our work on helping teachers adapt educational aspects of serious game scenarios to their pedagogical needs. Our research leads us to design an authoring tool named APPLiq based on a generic model for serious games scenarios named MoPPLiq. In this paper, we first describe the three main aspects of the model MoPPLiq. First, we introduce the concept of meta design. Second, we introduce MoPPLiq and how it models scenarios by sequences of discrete black boxes named “activities”. Then, we describe the “output states” that allow model the critical choices of the serious-players that can modify the course of the scenario. At last, we describe “input states” that aim to model the dynamic adaptation to serious-players, i.e. when an activity changes its behavior depending on the serious-player's model. After detailing MoPPLiq, we introduce APPLiq and its main features. APPliq is meant to design and adapt educational and recreational serious game scenarios. Therefore, we describe the main features of APPLiq: On one hand it depicts with a graphical representation the scenarios modeled with MoPPLiq. On the other hand, it provides a graphical user interface to change connection between output and input states of activities. APPLiq also provides a checking system that is able to check a serious game scenario for inconsistencies in the pedagogical scenario or in the game design. This system is also able to compensate automatically the non-pedagogical inconsistencies thanks to “buffer activities”. Finally, we describe the protocol and the results of a qualitative assessment that we conducted with about 20 teachers for several weeks on APPLiq and MoPPLiq. The discussion of the results shows that the graphical representation of MoPPLiq helps teachers to understand the ins and outs of the serious game they had to use during the experimentation. On the other hand, despite some ergonomics problems on the prototype of APPLiq tested, the results show that the authoring tool allowed teachers to create and to modify serious game scenarios that they declare relevant for their use.