Towards personalized feedback in educational computer games for children

Educational games as well as other computer games become an important part of children’s life and modern education. Feedback that is provided during a game to a child plays a significant role in computer games in general. In the context of educational computer games being developed for children game designers have additional challenges to address. In this paper we briefly introduce our framework for analyzing the concept of feedback in the context of learning and entertainment applications; and then, we present a comprehensive review of feedback studies and discuss problems of feedback personalization in educational computer games for children. Recent studies in user adaptive interfaces show that personalization and adaptation of interface parameters according to a user model can facilitate the increase of effectiveness in interacting and learning processes. In our work we consider similar ideas with respect to feedback personalization to a child in educational computer games. We emphasize that personalization can play even more important role in this context because of varying cognitive abilities, reading and elementary math skills among different children. Also, we present a general idea behind feedback adaptation mechanism adopted from user interface adaptation studies. We believe that this paper will contribute to better understanding of the challenges in the development of the educational computer games for children and attract attention of the educational computer games developers and specialists in the field of human-computer interaction to the problem of feedback. We hope also that our review will serve as a catalyst for further studies in feedback personalization in educational computer games.