A Knowledge-Delivery Gravity Model to Improve Game-Aided Pedagogy

Teaching materials have evolved from mere text to multiand hyper-media contents, leading to substantial growth in both information density and accessibility. One of the accompanying challenges with this evolution is the growing need to accurately quantify the degree of students’ stimulation and engagement in this new environment. Game-aided pedagogy can stimulate students’ interest and can complement their individual learning styles. It can also provide them with the appropriate amount of information density and accessibility, utilizing multimedia and hypermedia contents. This paper introduces a gravity model to measure the level of students’ engagement in game-aided pedagogy. The output of this model is the students’ engagement. Information density, ability of students to absorb knowledge, and knowledge delivery are considered in this model as impact factors. A multi-level web game was designed to enhance students’ understanding of certain concepts in transportation engineering (driver behavior in dilemma zone) and is used as a platform for testing our proposed concept. Our objective is to increase the students’ engagement and decrease the difficulty of knowledge-delivery. The game can simulate traffic operation scenarios and collect users’ gameplay data using refined 3D scenes. Vivid scenes attract students and multi-level design increases the appeal of the game and thus can stimulate students. Gameplay data collected from users can monitor students’ responses and gather their understanding of the delivered knowledge. This game has a “client” part and a “server” part. The client part interacts with students’ operation and renders scenes, while the server part stores students’ gameplay information and responds with different game levels accordingly. The client part was programmed with unity 3D and C# language together with HTML and Javascript. The server part was achieved by ASP.net and MS Access database. The output of this game can be used to assess the students’ learning outcomes. The result of this research can be used to quantify the students’ engagement gravity model’s parameters, which can in turn be used to guide the revision and development of the next generation game-aided pedagogy.