DEVELOPMENT OF A HIGHLY-ADAPTIVE EDUCATIONAL GAME KNOWLEDGE OLYMPICS

Abstract

Education is a very important segment in every man’s life, and modern development of information technologies provides a wide spectrum of their potential applications in education. On the other hand, games expose a competitive spirit and bring contentment to players. In knowledge contest, the game plays a direct part as an important motivational factor in adopting new knowledge and deepening the existing one. Games can be used for knowledge acquiring as well as for training and testing. In this paper we present the Knowledge Olympics software package, developed at the School of Electrical Engineering in Belgrade. The package is intended for knowledge testing through game. It is flexible enough to be used in a large number of humanities, natural and technical sciences. The knowledge testing method is sufficiently generalized and does not depend on knowledge level. Therefore, the possible package application ranges from elementary to high education. The knowledge is tested through a special form of an interactive quiz for one or more players, with elements of luck, which provides attractiveness and keeps the attention of the player-student. The key concept achieved in the package is a possibility of simple and flexible creation of quiz-games by the end-users. The package consists of two separate applications: Editor (intended for teachers) for flexible creation of games-lessons and Contest (intended for students) for conducting attractive games-tests. The package is implemented in Java programming language, which provides its full portability and availability on different platforms.