ENGAGE: A Game Based Learning and Problem Solving Framework.

摘要

As we gear up for larger studies we have begun to focus on improving the security and scalability of our server-side infrastructure. We have identified several areas of improvement in the infrastructure that we are going to focus on in order to support the wide-ranging deployments we're planning on this year: * Automatic scaling of logging and authentication servers and logging throttling. Throttling will allow for minimum levels to be set for different versions of the game. This will allow games conducting research to keep all data and games on sites with a large volume of players. * Framework for handling adaptive versions of games, which tie into teacher portal assignments. * Integration with schools' authentication systems, including Fronter, Its Learning and systems that use LDAP authentication. * Moving performance calculations for teacher portal to the server. Right now, the portal downloads all game logging data for all users; with a sufficient amount of users and play data, this becomes impractical. Instead, performance data will be calculated and cached on a nightly basis. We are also working on finalizing the 'homeplay' system, a system by which teachers using the Teacher Control Panel can assign specific levels or specific concepts to students. This will add the ability to define assignments by selecting core concepts and a number of levels.