Application of Edutainment Concepts and Tracking Emotions Based on Transient Emotion Peak in Online Education Systems

Abstract

Edutainment concepts such as Game-based learning(GBL) and ‘gamification’, pave the way for students to learnby experience by going beyond the traditional teacher-centredlearning environment concepts. This paper is an attempt toinvestigate the feasibility of implementing a virtual learningenvironment by using “Edutainment” concepts to teach Computer Science subjects to undergraduate students in the SriLankan context while finding the most effective way out ofGBL and gamification approaches in teaching and facilitating anonline test environment to have frequent formative assessmentsto self-evaluate themselves. The first goal was to identify thisstudent cohort’s preferred way out of GBL and gamificationin learning. In this study, a game and a similar gamificationapproach were designed to teach a subject. Next, a qualitativeanalysis was conducted by collecting students’ feedback on eachapproach and a quantitative analysis was done to compare theeffectiveness of the two approaches based on answers given toa quiz based on that subject. Under the second goal, it wasfound that effective feedback should address the emotional levelof the student too. Hence, this study proposed a systematic way totrack the emotional changes based on the transient emotion peak.We conclude, that adult students mostly tend to grab the coreconcepts rather than playing sophisticated games and though theproposed emotion tracking algorithm the emotions can be trackedat a promising accuracy level. In future work, we suggest thatit would be better to use the proposed time interval to track theconcentration level based on corresponding facial features.