Towards Automatic Generation of Serious Maze Games for Education

Abstract

Serious games based on video mazes can be easily and effectively applied for learning purposes with the goal of facilitating technology-enhanced education. In order to practice game-based learning for various curriculums, educators need software platforms for automatized construction and flexible customization of such games. This article presents an open software platform named Maze Builder built on Unity 3D, which is especially designed for automatic generation and easy modification of maze video games. We discuss the maze game design process, the platform architecture and its data model, the results obtained from the performance tests, and a practical experiment conducted with teachers using the platform for generating maze games with educational tasks embedded into maze rooms. The initial results acquired from these experiments are very positive and encouraging with regard of the usability of the Maze Builder platform by domain specialists who are not IT professionals.

ACM Computing Classification System (1998): D.2.6, D.2.10, K.8.0.