TEACHERS NEED PLATFORMS FOR CONSTRUCTION OF EDUCATIONAL VIDEO GAMES

At present, digital games are applied in education as a highly interactive visual media able to incorporate knowledge, didactic tasks, and virtual objects in an appealing and interactive way. For a massive penetration of educational video games into the learning process, teachers and educationalists do need simple and affordable software platforms for the easy construction and generation of such games in their subject area, in a straightforward way without any needs of programming. For greater both effectiveness and efficiency, constructed games for education should adjust their features such as task difficulty, object speed, learning content, and audio-visual effects depending on the outcomes and the emotional state shown by the player. Thus, players would be able to improve their skill levels, cognitive abilities, and general performance. The paper presents a case study aiming at the identification of user needs of platforms for construction of educational video games, developed within the scope of the project APOGEE (smArt adaPtive videO GamEs for Education). It outlines the stages of the conducted case study and the specifics of the questionnaire, in addition to presenting some of the initial results from the survey. Further, we make a statistical analysis of key findings and discuss both the meaning and importance of the obtained data. In conclusion, the research summarizes collected from respondents during case study and survey the recommendations concerning the functionality of the platform for the generation of smart adaptive video games for education and proposals for didactic mini-games.