Developing for personalised learning: the long road from educational objectives to development and feedback

This paper describes the development needed to support the functional and teaching requirements of iRead, a 4-year EU-funded project which produced an award-winning serious game utilising lexical and syntactical game content. The main functional requirement was that the game should retain different profiles for each student, encapsulating both the respective language model (which language features should be taught/used in the game first, before moving on to more advanced ones) and the user model (mastery level for each feature, as reported by the student's performance in the game). In addition to this, researchers and stakeholders stated additional requirements related to learning objectives and strategies to make the game more interesting and successful; these were implemented as a set of selection rules which take into account not only the mastery level for each feature, but also respect the priorities set by teachers, helping avoid repetition of content and features, and maintaining a balance between new content and revision of already mastered features to give students the sense of progress, while also reinforcing learning.