Geração procedural de conteúdo para criação de fases de jogos educativos

Abstract

Educational digital games have a large area of research that comes with the years throughout the international scene. This fact has been due to the potential that the games have of fun, immersion and stimulation to the learning of natural and personalized way. However, one of the major challenges in this area is the creation of games that meet specific content to be taught or practiced. In this sense, the procedural content generation has been presented as an area that can aid in the development of educational games. The procedural content generation (PCG) deals with the automatic creation of contents such as textures, sounds, objects and, in the context of this work, the level’s generation. Thus, it contributes to the creation of new levels without the need for human intervention. In this context, this research seeks to make use of PCG technique for the creation of phases of educational games that require the player to achieve certain pedagogical objectives throughout the game. For this, we propose a generation approach in three stages: (i) generation of the basic structure of the level (ex: only floors and walls); (ii) The generation of elements related to the pedagogical objectives of the level; (iii) complementing the rest of the stage with enemies and other scenario elements. In this way, it can be used to create different challenges and scenarios so that a student can practice certain content, since whenever a challenge is completed, a new challenge can be generated for the student. The PCG technique chosen to be applied with the proposed approach was based on grammar. We tried to verify if the technique together with the proposed approach assists in the generation of the educational games phases, being carried out the implementation with two games, which presented favorable results to the proposal. A case study was carried out, where the quality of the phases generated with pedagogues and graduates of the pedagogy course can be evaluated, resulting in positive responses in the application of the games.