Application of Edutainment Concepts and Tracking Emotions Based on Transient Emotion Peak in Online Education Systems

Edutainment concepts such as Game-based learning (GBL) and ‘gamification’, pave the way for students to learn by experience by going beyond the traditional teacher-centred learning environment concepts. This paper is an attempt to investigate the feasibility of implementing a virtual learning environment by using “Edutainment” concepts to teach Computer Science subjects to undergraduate students in the Sri Lankan context while finding the most effective way out of GBL and gamification approaches in teaching and facilitating an online test environment to have frequent formative assessments to self-evaluate themselves. The first goal was to identify this student cohort’s preferred way out of GBL and gamification in learning. In this study, a game and a similar gamification approach were designed to teach a subject. Next, a qualitative analysis was conducted by collecting students’ feedback on each approach and a quantitative analysis was done to compare the effectiveness of the two approaches based on answers given to a quiz based on that subject. Under the second goal, it was found that effective feedback should address the emotional level of the student too. Hence, this study proposed a systematic way to track the emotional changes based on the transient emotion peak. We conclude, that adult students mostly tend to grab the core concepts rather than playing sophisticated games and though the proposed emotion tracking algorithm the emotions can be tracked at a promising accuracy level. In future work, we suggest that it would be better to use the proposed time interval to track the concentration level based on corresponding facial features.