Developing for personalised learning: the long road from educational objectives to development and feedback

This paper describes the development needed to support the functional and\nteaching requirements of iRead, a 4-year EU-funded project which produced an\naward-winning serious game utilising lexical and syntactical game content. The\nmain functional requirement was that the game should retain different profiles\nfor each student, encapsulating both the respective language model (which\nlanguage features should be taught/used in the game first, before moving on to\nmore advanced ones) and the user model (mastery level for each feature, as\nreported by the student's performance in the game). In addition to this,\nresearchers and stakeholders stated additional requirements related to learning\nobjectives and strategies to make the game more interesting and successful;\nthese were implemented as a set of selection rules which take into account not\nonly the mastery level for each feature, but also respect the priorities set by\nteachers, helping avoid repetition of content and features, and maintaining a\nbalance between new content and revision of already mastered features to give\nstudents the sense of progress, while also reinforcing learning.\n