Directions for the Design of an Adaptive In-Game Re-engagement Dashboard for Teachers Using WHIMC

• Main Authors: Casano, Jonathan D.L, Fuentes, Mikael, Paguio, Clark Joshua
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2023
• Subjects: Human-in-the-loop teaching; Minecraft; Minecraft logs; WHIMC; Computer Engineering; Education; Educational Technology; Electrical and Computer Engineering; Engineering
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/discs-faculty-pubs/376; https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34735-1_7
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

This paper shows the ideation and development of an In-Game Dashboard within WHIMC that presents real-time statistics about player Re-engagement which teachers may utilize to support human-in-the-loop teaching. The attempt of converting the delayed analysis done from previous work (using Python and Pandas) to an instantaneous analysis within Minecraft (using Spigot API and JDBC) allowed the discovery of which elements in previous work are translatable into real-time statistics within WHIMC as well as how exactly these reports may be shown given the affordances and constraints of Spigot API and JDBC. It was found that showing frequencies such as the count of overlapping play times (Social Play), and showing which maps were visited within and outside testing hours (Free Exploration) may be implemented as real-time modules for the Dashboard. Other analyses, such as those that track data that happens over time, for instance, overlapping play times across days (Social Play), and presenting clustered archetypes or computations that are a result of clustering (Free Exploration) are not easily translatable. Since the Minecraft native API is not fully customizable, this paper demonstrated how the CommandExecutor API and HolographicDisplays API were utilized to provide the experience that approximates a working real-time Dashboard. The paper ends with a few suggested ideas for future work in terms of making the game adaptive as enabled by the frequencies and analyses being reported by the Dashboard.