A Framework of Educational Control in Game-based Learning Environment

The popularity of computer games has grown enormously in recent year. Many studies and systems that incorporate the inherent elements such as "pleasure" and "fun" in the game to improve a learner's motivation have been developed in the field of learning environments. However, there are still few studies of situations where many learners gather at a single computer and participate in a game-based learning environment and where a computer designs the learning process by controlling the interactions such as competition, collaboration, and learning by teaching between learners. Therefore we propose a method that generates interaction between learners intentionally to create a learning opportunity that is based on the knowledge understanding model of an individual learner. In this paper, we explain the framework of our game-based learning environment (GBLE) called "Who becomes the king in the country of mathematics?" and describe the method for educational control in the learning environment. Furthermore, we introduce some comments a principle and a teacher for learning experiment of our GBLE which we carried out in a junior high school. From the result of the experiment and some comments, we noticed that the power of the game have possibility to make a relationship among students weaken and go learning forward in new relationship in the world of the game.