Designing and Tracking Play Styles in Solving the Incognitum

An acute understanding of how learners behave within educational games is crucial to building personalized learning games. Although most traditional instruments are designed to measure one’s intrinsic characteristic such as motivation, they may not indicate how the learner will play a specific game. In this paper, we present a study in which we use a combination of traditional instrument and gameplay data to track how learners behave in a small-scale learning game called Solving the Incognitum. Our main contribution is that this study is among the first to provide empirical evidence that learners change their play styles within the same gameplay session.