It is planned in TARGET to track the progress of learners and perhaps give feedback that helps them during a serious game or during later discussions of a game episode. Our expected approach will advance the state of the art, and will allow comparisons to be made with emerging evaluation techniques such as the use of Petri net models. An example of the latter will soon be presented at the 9th International Conference on Advances in Web-Based Learning (ICWL), Shanghai, China, December 8-10, 2010, in the paper "Using the Petri Nets for the Learner Assessment in Serious Games" by Amel Yessad, Pradeepa Thomas, Bruno Capdevila and Jean-Marc Labat. As they say, "In serious games, it is very hard to define and mix the learning situations with the game characteristics, and to integrate an assessment and guidance process of the learner, without disturbing the game progress and maintaining the intrinsic characteristics of the video game: fun, player motivation, immersion and interaction." They propose an approach based on a Petri net to assess learners and detect misconceptions. In their game design stage, they have a discussion between domain experts, learning experts, and game designers, "in order to identify the actions in the game that imply knowledge acquisition and allow achieving the learning objectives of levels". In their approach, "the Petri net models only game actions allowing the learner to acquire knowledge". They "use the reachability graph of the Petri net to track the learner in order to detect, in real time, the learner’s misconceptions, improve learner assessment and provide an accurate feed back for both the learner and the instructor." We anticipate being able to benchmark TARGET against their approach.

Their full paper will be available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-3-642-17406-3/contents/