Application of Edutainment Concepts and Tracking Emotions Based on Transient Emotion Peak in Online Education Systems

Abstract

Abstract The current teaching practice in most of the educational institutes is to follow the conventional approach where the role of the teachers is to communicate everything outlined in the syllabus to the students rather than encouraging them to learn and explore themselves. As a result, the intellectual creativity and the thinking ability of the students are limited to a frame. It is found that learning by experience is more efficient and effective than learning in a teacher centered learning environment. From a few decades ago, introduction of computer games for educational purposes was drawn attention of the educationists since a variety of opportunities are available to apply the knowledge within a virtual world facilitating the learning process through the concept of “Edutainment”. The two main approaches that are considered as “Edutainment” concepts are GBL and gamification. This research is an attempt of investigating the feasibility of implementing a virtual learning environment by using “Edutainment” concepts to teach Computer Science subjects to undergraduate students, to find the most the effective way out of GBL and gamification approaches in teaching Computer Science subjects to undergraduates and to facilitate an online test environment to the students to have frequent formative assessments to self-evaluate themselves so that they can go for a higher grade at the end of the summative assessment. Even though, there were many games available for undergraduates, those games were not challenging games, they were role-play games or quests-based games. Hence, the first attempt of this research was to introduce a challenging game as a GBL approach to Computer Science undergraduates. A car game was developed to teach ‘Peterson’s algorithm’ which comes under Operating Systems course module in Computer Science undergraduate syllabus. The game was given to students prior and after they attend the lecture based on this algorithm and gathered their feedback on the game through a questionnaire. The questionnaire was designed to analyse the students’ opinions on the game. As there were no proper analysis had been carried out by researchers to compare Computer Science undergraduate students’ perspectives towards gamification vs Game based learning (GBL) learning approaches, the next target was to compare the higher education students’ perspective towards these two approaches. Taking into account the feedback that the students had provided at the previous study, it was decided to compare a game based learning instance with a gamification instance. A quantitative analysis was done to compare the effectiveness of the two approaches by letting the students to answer a quiz after letting the students to study through the game and the gamification module. The test marks and time taken to answer each question were analysed to compare which method was effective with this cohort of the students. Moreover, a qualitative analysis was conducted by getting the students feedback on each approach. The other goal was to facilitate the students to have frequent formative assessments and to let the students to self-evaluate their performance. Under this section, it was found that synthesizing a feedback should consider not only the correctness of the answer but also another two factors i.e. the effort that a student has put when engaging in learning and an evaluation based on their performance like analysing the time-spent in answering a question. It is easier to mark an answer as correct or iii wrong and to get the time spent to answer a question. It is a proven thing that students’ emotions can be analysed to find the effort that a student has put in answering a question. Considering all these factors, emotional level of the student, correctness of the answer and time taken to answer a question had been identified as the key factors of generating an effective feedback. It was found that, usage of hardware equipment in analysing the emotional changes in online education systems, impedes the effort of gathering the true emotional changes of the students. Hence, it was decided to use a webcam to track the facial expressions to interpret the emotions of the students. There were research work carried out to track emotions by using the webcams, however those research were used to analyse the changes in emotional/concentration level for a longer period of time for example to measure the concentration level during a lecture. But here, the intention was to analyse the emotional changes while a student is answering to set of questions. Therefore, this study proposes a systematic way to track the emotional changes based on the transient emotion peak. Further, it was noted that, the emotional changes elaborate through facial expressions can be intensified through body cues. There were no research work conducted to investigate the effect of body cues in analysing the emotions through facial expressions in online education systems, but there were research work that were carried out to check the effect body cues of in analysing emotions in fields like sports. Finally, this research can be concluded with three main findings. When it comes to adult learning, it was discovered that adult students mostly tend to grab the core concepts rather than playing fancy games, but they can be motivated with basic gaming concepts. The first observation and the conclusion that was able to derive from this study was that the concept called “gamification” is a better solution than GBL for Computer Science undergraduates. The second conclusion that was able to derive was that the proposed systematic algorithm works at a 71.52% accuracy level in identifying the emotional changes in an online test environment. However, it can be said that, it would be better to use this proposed time interval to track the concentration level of the students by tracking the eye-ball movements. The other conclusion was, that there is no significance effect in body cues in analysing the emotional changes through facial expressions in online education systems. Finally, this research was able to design a set of lessons and tests as formative assessments components to Computer Science undergraduates along with three feedback components which have to be taken into account when forming an effective feedback.