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1. Cognitive Engagement for STEM+C Education: Investigating Serious Game Impact on Graph Structure Learning with fNIRS

   https://doi.org/10.1109/AIxVR59861.2024.00032  

   Sharmin, Shayla; Koiler, Reza; Sadik, Rifat; Bhattacharjee, Arpan; Patre, Priyanka Raju; Kullu, Pinar; Hohensee, Charles; Getchell, Nancy; Barmaki, Roghayeh Leila (January 2024, IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality)

   For serious games on education, understanding the effectiveness of different learning methods in influencing cognitive processes remains a significant challenge. In particular, limited research addresses the comparative effectiveness of serious games and videos in analyzing brain behavior for graph structure learning, which is an important part of the Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Computing (STEM+C) disciplinary education. This study investigates the impact of serious games on graph structure learning. For this, we compared our in-house game-based learning (GBL) and video-based learning (VBL) methodologies by evaluating their effectiveness on cognitive processes by oxygenated hemoglobin levels using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). We conducted a 2×1 between-subjects preliminary study with twelve participants, involving two conditions: game and video. Both groups received equivalent content related to the basic structure of a graph, with comparable session lengths. The game group interacted with a quiz-based game, while the video group watched a pre-recorded video. The fNIRS was employed to capture cerebral signals from the prefrontal cortex, and participants completed pre- and post-questionnaires capturing user experience and knowledge gain. In our study, we noted that the mean levels of oxygenated hemoglobin (delta HbO) were higher in the GBL group, suggesting the potential enhanced cognitive involvement. Our results show that the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) has greater hemodynamic activity during the learning period. Moreover, knowledge gain analysis showed an increase in mean score in the GBL group compared to the VBL group. Although we did not observe statistically significant changes due to participant variability and sample size, this preliminary work contributes to understanding how GBL and VBL impact cognitive processes, providing insights for enhanced instructional design and educational game development. Additionally, it emphasizes the necessity for further investigation into the impact of GBL on cognitive engagement and learning outcomes. 

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2. What Drives Student Engagement and Learning in Video Lectures? An Investigation of Instructor Visibility, Playback Speed, and Student Preferences

   https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.70026  

   Ahn, Dahwi; Chan, Jason_C K (March 2025, Applied Cognitive Psychology)

   COVID‐19 greatly increased the online delivery of higher education. But one limitation of online learning is that students often struggle to stay engaged while watching online lectures. We examined whether including an instructor's face in lecture videos (instructor visibility) enhances student engagement or learning. In two preregistered experiments, we found that instructor visibility in lecture videos did not affect either engagement or learning overall. However, participants reported higher engagement when they watched a video that aligned with their preference for instructor visibility. For example, participants who favored videos with the instructor visible reported greater engagement with such videos compared to those without the instructor, and vice versa. Additionally, we examined the effects of playback speed on engagement and learning. Our results suggest that speeded playing did not impact engagement but resulted in better learning efficiency. Lastly, using GPT, we explored participants' open‐ended responses to understand their preference for video lectures. 

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3. “Elinor’s Talking to Me!”:Integrating Conversational AI into Children’s Narrative Science Programming

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3502050  

   Xu, Ying; Vigil, Valery; Bustamante, Andres S.; Warschauer, Mark (April 2022, Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

   Video programs are important, accessible educational resources for young children, especially those from an under-resourced backgrounds. These programs’ potential can be amplified if children are allowed to socially interact with media characters during their video watching. This paper presents the design and empirical investigation of interactive science-focused videos in which the main character, powered by a conversational agent, engaged in contingent conversation with children by asking children questions and providing responsive feedback. We found that children actively interacted with the media character in the conversational videos and their parents spontaneously provided support in the process. We also found that the children who watched the conversational video performed better in the immediate, episode-specific science assessment compared to their peers who watched the broadcast, non-interactive version of the same episode. Several design implications are discussed for using conversational technologies to better support child active learning and parent involvement in video watching. 

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4. Board 32: Preliminary Findings: RIEF - Understanding Pedagogically Motivating Factors for Under-represented and Non-traditional Students in Online Engineering Learning Modules

   Cook-Chennault, Kimberly and (July 2019, ASEE - 126th Annual COnference and Exposition)

   The quest to incorporate digital games into US classrooms has been pervasive in educational communities over the last two decades. Educational video games have been studied as a mechanism for enhancing the engagement and performance of underrepresented groups (UGs) in spatial learning, physics, computer science, general engineering, software and electrical engineering, mechanical engineering (ME) computer aided design, and aerospace engineering. Less than a handful of these studies have explored games’ appeal, efficacy or UG performance as a function of gender. Preliminary findings on a study that explores the appeal, efficacy, and performance of UGs in engineering-based educational video games as a function of gender and those of intersectional backgrounds is discussed. Emphasis is placed on elucidating these students' perceptions of serious game structure, design and content, and how these factors motivate their learning of engineering concepts and self-identification as engineers. This work builds upon the Technology Acceptance Model. 

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5. General video game rule generation

   https://doi.org/10.1109/cig.2017.8080431  

   Khalifa, Ahmed; Green, Michael Cerny; Perez-Liebana, Diego; Togelius, Julian (August 2017, 2017 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG))

   We introduce the General Video Game Rule Gen- eration problem, and the eponymous software framework which will be used in a new track of the General Video Game AI (GVGAI) competition. The problem is, given a game level as input, to generate the rules of a game that fits that level. This can be seen as the inverse of the General Video Game Level Generation problem. Conceptualizing these two problems as separate helps breaking the very hard problem of generating complete games into smaller, more manageable subproblems. The proposed framework builds on the GVGAI software and thus asks the rule generator for rules defined in the Video Game Description Language. We describe the API, and three different rule generators: a random, a constructive and a search- based generator. Early results indicate that the constructive generator generates playable and somewhat interesting game rules but has a limited expressive range, whereas the search- based generator generates remarkably diverse rulesets, but with an uneven quality. 

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