Educational Game and Intelligent Tutoring System - A Classroom Study and Comparative Design Analysis

Explore a comparative study between educational games and intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) in this 21-minute conference talk from the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Delve into the classroom experiment that pitted DragonBox, a popular commercial game for equation solving, against Lynnette, a research-based ITS. Examine the outcomes of 190 7th and 8th grade students randomly assigned to either system for five class periods, focusing on out-of-system transfer of learning, enjoyment, and accuracy of self-assessment. Analyze the surprising results that reveal DragonBox users solved more problems and enjoyed the experience more, while Lynnette users performed significantly better on post-tests. Gain insights into the design features of both systems and consider potential ways to combine their strengths. Understand the importance of rigorous empirical evaluation in educational technologies and how intuitions about educational effectiveness can be misleading.