Knowledge-based assessment in serious games: an experience on emergency training

Emergency preparedness is a promising application field for digital serious games enabling the simulation of real emergency scenarios and allowing a high learning transfer thanks to engagement and focus on specific tasks. Games can also play a role in the assessment that may happen without interrupting the learner, observing and evaluating what she is doing. Based on these premises we defined a serious game for evacuation training targeted to primary and secondary school students. The student is immersed in a virtual environment representing her school during an emergency with the aim of evacuating the building and adopting the correct behaviour. Any performed action is evaluated by the system, feedback is provided immediately and also when the game ends. Recovery micro-learning resources are then arranged and provided to the students to explain any errors they made and to help them reach better performances. The system is based on the application of a theoretical framework for evidence-based assessment where knowledge-based structures have been used to represent emergency skills and to relate them to possible actions within the game. An experiment with students coming from four Italian schools has been also performed to validate the models and the prototype.