Assessment rules

To edit an assessment rule it must be selected on the rules list. New rules can be also added following these instructions. The next fields can be edited in an assessment rule:

• Importance: This field accepts one of the next values (from lowest to highest): Very low, low, normal, high and very high. By default the rule will be given the "normal" value. When an assessment report is generated manually by the student (using the appropriate option on the game menu) he or she can select the importance threshold. In this manner, the student will only get the feedback that he or she considers relevant.
• Concept: Brief textual description of what the rule aims to evaluate. This field will be written onto the assessment report using a bold font.
• Conditions: The set of conditions (over flags and variables) that must be satisfied to trigger the rule. The game author can modify the values of those flags and variables by triggering appropriate effects when the student performs any action that deserves evaluation and/or feedback. For instance, the game author may decide to activate a flag when a student fails on the achievement of a game task, and use that flag to trigger an assessment rule that subtracts some points from the final score of the student. (for more information see conditions)
• Text: Complete text description of the concept that triggered the assessment rule. This field will be written onto the assessment report just behind the concept, but using a normal font size. It will typically contain detailed information about what the student did right or wrong, and what should the correct answer be.
• Properties: Each property is a pair of the form <key, value>. When the rule is satisfied the key will be assigned the value specified. These properties can be sent to a central Learning Management System (LMS) such as Moodle or Sakai for processing and attachment to the student's profile. Therefore the values of these properties will not be printed on the assessment report that the student will see. They can be used to define global or partial scores for the student, or to indicate the LMS what are the learning outcomes. If the profile is based on SCORM the keys will be the fields specified by the CMI data model (More info in: Profile Type).

Timed Assessment Rules

These rules have an associated timer that will start timing when the init conditions are met. The timer is stopped when the end conditions are satisfied. The game author can define different effects to be triggered depending on the elapsed time. Each effect will be assigned a time range, so if the elapsed time fits within a time range the corresponding effect will be triggered. The effect is compounded by the text and the <key, value> list as for normal assessment rules. If the elapsed time does not fit in any of the time ranges defined, no action is performed. If the elapsed time fits in two or more different ranges, the effect defined for the first one will be triggered (note that time ranges do not need to be disjoint).

In this manner game authors can define evaluations that depend on the time that the student invests in completing the tasks.

Finally, both the normal and timed assessment rules can be used to generate a human-readable HTML report (like the one below), devised for the student, or an XML machine-readable report, designed for the LMS.