Judged by the Cover: Investigating the Effect of Adaptive Game Interface on the Learning Experience

Adaptive educational games have shown potential in enhancing the learning experience in educational setups. Most of the conducted research used the content and level of difficulty as the adaptive aspect. However, in this work we aim to evaluate the effect of changing the game interface including; background music and color as well as dynamics represented by the timer and scoring technique. We built adaptive educational games using subjective measures, where the adaptive features are manipulated based on reported emotions by the participants. We conducted a between subject study with 30 participants using adaptive and non-adaptive version of the game to assess the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive aspects on the learning experience, namely, learning gain and the engagement level. Our findings showed a significant increase in the learning gain and the engagement level of the participants who used the adaptive version of the system over the other. Finally, we discuss the implication of our findings and potential added value of our findings.