Data-Driven Performance Prediction in a Geometry Game Environment

Abstract

The rapid technological evolution of the last years motivated students to develop competencies and capabilities that will prepare them for an unknown future of the 21st century. In this context, teachers intend to optimise the process of learning and make it more dynamic and exciting by introducing gamification. Thus, this paper focuses on a data-driven assessment of geometry competencies, which are essential for developing problem-solving and higher-order thinking skills. We explored them in the domain of knowledge inference, whose primary goal is to predict or measure the students’ knowledge over questions as they interact with a learning platform at a specific time. Hence, the main goal of the current paper is to compare several well-known algorithms applied to the data of a geometry game named Shadowspect in order to predict students’ performance in terms of classifier metrics such as Area Under Curve (AUC), accuracy, and F1 score. We found Elo to be the algorithm with the best prediction power. However, the rest of the algorithms also showed decent results, and, therefore, we can conclude that all the algorithms hold the potential to measure and estimate the actual knowledge of students. In turn, this means that they can be applied in formal education to improve teaching, learning, organisational efficiency and, as a consequence, this can serve as a basement for a change in the system.