A randomised control trial for measuring student engagement through the Internet of Things and serious games

The combination of the Internet of Things (IoT) with Serious Games is an academic domain of research increasing in popularity. Combining Serious Games with the interconnected hardware and middleware driven ecosystem of IoT develops data-driven games that source data from the local or extended physical environment to progress in the virtual environment of gaming, better-informing players through the game experience. The following paper presents the evaluation of a software framework defined for combining Serious Games and IoT, achieved using a semester-long experiment with a randomised control trial. The study aimed to produce an effective method of measuring student engagement using sensor-based information and a game environment but not improve the level of student engagement with their related academic programme. The results of the empirical experiment provide perceived evidences in the measure of engagement when compared to academic performance. The experiment results are not statistically significant due to the small sample size and the empirical nature of the work. The findings of this paper validate the effectiveness of a software framework for combining Serious Games and IoT and encourages new real-world applications of Smart Serious Games that include healthcare, education, simulation and others.