Adding a Virtual Personal Tutor to an educational spelling game

Abstract

In this thesis the e ects of having a virtual personal tutor in an educa- tional game are studied. For this, a new educational game was developed in which people had to judge or spell as many English words as they could within ve minutes. There were two versions of the game. One of them contained a virtual personal tutor which tried to help and support play- ers in the exercises. When comparing the results of the two versions, it showed that players who had the tutor available to them had a higher increase in game-score than players who did not. Tutored players liked the game better. However, it resulted also in more irritation and conse- quently in less games being played because it distracted players from the main game-objective.