How to Tailor Educational Maze Games: The Student’s Preferences

Abstract

Personalized learning has gained in popularity over the past decade. It provides learners with learning resources that comply with their characteristics and preferences or offers them tasks and quizzes adapted to their performance. This research presents how we apply this concept to an educational video maze game created and generated on the APOGEE platform. In particular, this article explores the following three research questions: (1) Which characteristics in the student’s model should be considered for the personalization of educational video games? (2) What are the student’s preferences regarding the personalization of educational video games? (3) How should the process of personalization of educational video games be organized? The answers to these questions are found by conducting practical experiments concerning user experience with the educational maze video game. The article also describes the model of students comprising user’s, learner’s, and player’s aspects with both static and dynamic features. Further, the personalization process of educational games based on this model is described. The results showing the student’s preferences are presented and critically examined. The provided discussion involves the disparities in the preferences of different groups of students concerning the amounts of play of learning games, preferred mini-games, and parameters to which educational materials should be tailored.