RICH ЕDUCATIONAL VIDEO MAZES AS A VISUAL ENVIRONMENT FOR GAME-BASED LEARNING

Abstract

Thanks to their impressive interactive abilities, video games are applied for decades as an engaging means for effective and efficient game-based learning. This paper presents the vision of applying rich educational video mazes as a visual environment for game-based learning. It defines a rich educational maze as a 3D maze video game providing rich didactic multimedia content presented within the maze nodes not only on learning boards but as well within puzzle games of various types. The game designer can embed the puzzle games into each one of the maze rooms and provide learning content personalized upon various characteristics of the player (the learner). In addition, such an educational maze is supposed to provide a rich gaming and learning experience thanks to including intelligent virtual players and applying a dynamic, player-centric adaptation of the difficulty of learning tasks and of the audio-visual properties of the game environment. This paper outlines the essence of a rich educational video maze games including its concept, genre, target audience, look and feel, game interface and artificial intelligence, with a special focus on the mission, challenges, and objectives of the game. As well, it provides some results from an online survey about the usability of such educational video mazes from the student point of view.