EVALUATION MODEL OF EDUCATIONAL GAMES WITH AFFECTIVE COMPONENT
Many studies show the importance of considering emotion as an integral part of learning and describe how positive emotions, such as pleasure, improve this process. However, there is a dearth of systematic research on the relationship of positive emotions to learning, as well as models that provide guidance on how to design and evaluate more attractive educational games that balance fun and learning. Designing educational games requires considering, in addition to cognitive elements, components that motivate students to stay in the game while learning. This works uses the concepts and definitions of computing and multimodal ways of recognizing the student’s emotion while playing an educational game with the intention of producing a model for evaluating educational games that, hopefully, is able to maintain the balance between motivation and learning in these spaces. A bibliographic review was carried out on the main concepts and definitions of the subjects that supported the research, among which, affective computing, game design, user experience and a learning theory that relates emotion with cognitive processes. In addition, a systematic literature review was carried out to identify the main models for designing and evaluating educational games. From these elements, a pre-experiment was carried out that sought to record the emotions presented by the students while playing an educational game. For the recognition of facial emotions, an algorithm was developed in the Python programming language that used a convolutional neural network. In addition, a pre and post questionnaire was applied, respectively to define the profile of the participants and to analyze the experience felt by these participants during the game. With the results of this pre-experiment it is sought to extract a set of attributes and properties that can compose the evaluation model to be proposed that allows to improve the player’s experience based on adjustments in the narrative, mechanics and aesthetics of the game and that consider the cognitive and emotional components. The idea is that, when finalized, the model can be applied in the design phase of educational games serving as an assessment tool. The results will be analyzed and discussed and future work will be recommended at the end.