Eleaga, E-learning Games Eleaga, E-learning Games

Eleaga – e-learning games on STACK platform

Our purpose is to bring intelligently responsive digital learning experiences to all matematical topics.

Services

Do you already know about STACK? How about the free STACK material repository ABACUS?

STACK is a mature Computer Aided Assessment (CAA) system suitable for most interactive mathematical content. The centre of development of STACK is in the University of Edinburgh. The CEO of Eleaga Matti Harjula is one of the key open source developers in STACK community. The partners of Eleaga have teaching and research experience with STACK in large scale use in Otaniemi, Finland, since 2006.

We offer consultation services on all aspects of STACK technology. More precisely, Eleaga can provide guidance on how to start using it:

  1. We arrange courses about STACK question authoring on basic and advanced levels.
  2. We provide instruction on best practices and avoiding common pit-falls related to running STACK within Moodle environment.
  3. We have a technical consultation service for setting up STACK installations and tuning their performance with, e.g., MaximaPool.

Contact us to find out how we can assist you in STACK/Moodle needs.

Products

Our key product is Stateful – the advanced framework for game-like exercises for teaching mathematical subjects from elementary school to university level.

Briefly, Stateful is a game engine that exploits the full power of the popular STACK question type, originally developed by Professor Chris Sangwin, and the Computer Algebra System (CAS) Maxima. In Stateful, storylines consist of multiple scenes that are traversed in the course of exploring the narrative. The individual scenes resemble traditional STACK questions, but the sequence of scenes can be defined and modified depending on student's choices and past performance.

The gamified framework Stateful is a server-client application where the server side consists of a platform (such as Moodle or ILIAS) executing the STACK question engine, Stateful extensions, and the CAS. On the client side, the question material is represented to the student as an interative web page — or as embedded content — on any of the major web browsers.

The design of game-like learning materials is a challenging effort. To facilitate this work, an authoring tool Eleaga Editor is provided. Eleaga Editor has the usual features of software development environments, and it seamlessly integrates to Stateful. Both Stateful and Eleaga Editor have interfaces for future learning analytics systems that may process the student response material by modern data analysis methods.

State-variables are a key part of a Stateful question. They are defined at the top level in Eleaga Editor shown above. The editor allows working with the graphical user interface, but writing code is possible, too.
The text, the input fields, and the logic for input classification is required in order to produce scenes. The state can also be changed by the classification logic in Stateful. The technology of classical rogue-like computer games has inspired the design of Stateful.
The design of game-like Stateful questions can be represented as graphs in Eleaga Editor. When testing the scene graph of a complex question, it helps to have bespoke tools that traverse the graph and look for issues.

The original prototype version of Stateful was published in 2017, and some experimental material was produced to study the concept. The current, completely rewritten version of the platform is currently being piloted in teaching physics and medication calculus in pioneering Finnish institutes of higher education.

Stateful and STACK are both available under GPLv3 license. Eleaga Editor, its extensions, and documentation are proprietary Eleaga Ltd Oy software.

Please, contact us if you find our product line interesting.