Educational games, or more generally "Intelligent Tutoring Systems," might record log data of a user’s session. Using educational data mining techniques, this log data can let you analyze behavior and performance to better support the user.

Log data could make applications like personalized help, automatic hints and real time-feedback possible. Looking directly at user behavior could enable game-based learning assessments, where a user demonstrates understanding through their actions without needing to explain it with some other possibly difficult formalism. These applications are already being used by educational tools like Duolingo, ST Math, or in many projects from NCSU's Game2Learn lab.

Privacy Concerns

While I think these applications are awesome, it comes with some privacy concerns for users. Someone might be uncomfortable with their data being recorded as they play or use a tool, especially if it would be included in more fine-grained analysis. Users should have control over whether or not log data is recorded.

Recording Log Data in LFP

I added logging to LFP with these possible applications and privacy concerns in mind.

On the main menu, users are able to configure whether or not they ant logging enabled, making it disabled by default.

When the user does enable logging, they configure where data will be sent by providing a URL that the REST API will connect to. I’m imagining either an instructor would provide this or they would choose from a drop-down.

To help with analysis, each game session gets a unique game session id. Later versions should probably have some other ID unique to each user, so different game sessions for the same person can be related to one another. However, this is better for privacy since you can’t tell who played that session with the ID alone.

If logging is enabled, logs are sent to the server through REST API calls during play. For testing, I’ve been recording logs to a local Firestore database.

Logs are only recorded when the player does an action such as moving a token, undoing, or completing a level. Other metadata may help reconstruct what happened during a game session.

Recording game logs is the first step for features like detecting when the player is stuck or enabling automatic hints. These and other features will hopefully make playing and understanding the game easier.