A framework to support interoperable Game‐based Assessments as a Service (GBAaaS): Design, development, and use cases

Abstract

During the last few years, there has been increasing attention paid to serious games (SGs), which are games used for non‐entertainment purposes. SGs offer the potential for more valid and reliable assessments compared to traditional methods such as paper‐and‐pencil tests. However, the incorporation of assessment features into SGs is still in its early stages, requiring specific design efforts for each game and adding significant time to the design of Game‐based Assessments (GBAs). In this research, we present a completely novel framework that aims to perform interoperable GBAs by: (a) integrating a common GBA ontology model to process RDF data; (b) developing in‐game metrics to infer useful information and assess learners; (c) integrating a service API to provide an easy way to interact with the framework. We then validate our approach through performance evaluation and two use cases, demonstrating its effectiveness in real‐world scenarios with large‐scale datasets. Our results show that the developed framework achieves excellent performance, replicating metrics from previous literature. We anticipate that our work will help alleviate current limitations in the field and facilitate the deployment of GBAs as a Service.