The effect of challenge-based gamification on learning: An experiment in the context of statistics education.

Gamification is increasingly employed in learning environments as a way to increase student motivation and consequent learning outcomes. However, while the research on the effectiveness of gamification in the context of education has been growing, there are blind spots regarding which types of gamification may be suitable for different educational contexts. This study investigates the effects of the challenge-based gamification on learning in the area of statistics education. We developed a gamification approach, called Horses for Courses, which is composed of main game design patterns related to the challenge-based gamification; points, levels, challenges and a leaderboard. Having conducted a 2 (read: yes vs. no) x 2 (gamification: yes vs. no) between-subject experiment, we present a quantitative analysis of the performance of 365 students from two different academic majors: Electrical and Computer Engineering (n=279), and Business Administration (n=86). The results of our experiments show that the challenge-based gamification had a positive impact on student learning compared to traditional teaching methods (compared to having no treatment and treatment involving reading exercises). The effect was larger for females or for students at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Fusing visual and behavioral cues for modeling user experience in games.

Estimating affective and cognitive states in conditions of rich human-computer interaction, such as in games, is a field of growing academic and commercial interest. Entertainment and serious games can benefit from recent advances in the field as, having access to predictors of the current state of the player (or learner) can provide useful information for feeding adaptation mechanisms that aim to maximize engagement or learning effects. In this paper, we introduce a large data corpus derived from 58 participants that play the popular Super Mario Bros platform game and attempt to create accurate models of player experience for this game genre. Within the view of the current research, features extracted both from player gameplay behavior and game levels, and player visual characteristics have been used as potential indicators of reported affect expressed as pairwise preferences between different game sessions. Using neuroevolutionary preference learning and automatic feature selection, highly accurate models of reported engagement, frustration, and challenge are constructed (model accuracies reach 91%, 92%, and 88% for engagement, frustration, and challenge, respectively). As a step further, the derived player experience models can be used to personalize the game level to desired levels of engagement, frustration, and challenge as game content is mapped to player experience through the behavioral and expressivity patterns of each player.

Utilization of evidence theory in the detection of salient regions in successive CT images.

This study presents an integrated approach to locating and presenting the medical practitioner with salient regions in a computed tomography (CT) scan when focusing on the area of the liver. A number of image processing tasks are performed in successive scans to extract areas with a different features than that of the greater part of the organ. In general, these areas do not always correspond to pathological patterns, but may be the result of noise in the scanned image or related to veins passing through the tissue. The result of the algorithm is the original image with a mask indicating these regions, so the attention of the medical practitioner is drawn to them for further examination. The algorithm also calculates a measure of confidence of the system, with respect to the extraction of the salient region, based on the fact that a region with a similar pattern is also located in successive scans. This essentially represents the hypothesis that the volume of both pathological patterns and blood vessels, but not noise patterns, is large enough to be captured in successive scans.

Emotion recognition through facial expression analysis based on a neurofuzzy network.

Extracting and validating emotional cues through analysis of users' facial expressions is of high importance for improving the level of interaction in man machine communication systems. Extraction of appropriate facial features and consequent recognition of the user's emotional state that can be robust to facial expression variations among different users is the topic of this paper. Facial animation parameters (FAPs) defined according to the ISO MPEG-4 standard are extracted by a robust facial analysis system, accompanied by appropriate confidence measures of the estimation accuracy. A novel neurofuzzy system is then created, based on rules that have been defined through analysis of FAP variations both at the discrete emotional space, as well as in the 2D continuous activation-evaluation one. The neurofuzzy system allows for further learning and adaptation to specific users' facial expression characteristics, measured though FAP estimation in real life application of the system, using analysis by clustering of the obtained FAP values. Experimental studies with emotionally expressive datasets, generated in the EC IST ERMIS project indicate the good performance and potential of the developed technologies.