A USER-INTERFACE ENVIRONMENT SOLUTION AS AN

EDUCATIONAL TOOL FOR AN ONLINE CHESS SERVER

ON THE WEB

Juliano Picussa, Laura S. Garc´ıa, Juliana Bueno, M´arica V. R. Ferreira

Alexandre I. Direne, Luis C. E. de Bona, Fabiano Silva, Marcos A. Castilho and Marcos S. Sunye

Informatics Department, Federal University of Paran´a, Centro Polit´ecnico, Jardim das Am´ericas, Curitiba – PR, Brazil

Keywords:

e-Learning and e-Teaching, Human Factors.

Abstract:

This article describes an interaction and interface environment for a public online chess server, on the web,

as an educational tool. The main purpose of the environment is to improve chess teaching in Brazilian public

schools. The vast majority of such chess online servers considerer and take for granted that users are specialists

rather than learners. The solution describes in this article is inserted in an education environment, aiming at

providing users with direct access to the contextually signiﬁcant actions by means of strategic and operational

help.

1 INTRODUCTION

In the present article we describe the develop-

ment of an interaction and interface environment for

XadrezLivre (http://xadrezlivre.c3sl.ufpr.br) – a pub-

lic, online chess server based upon Free Software,

whose main aim is to work as a chess education tool.

The vast majority of such chess online servers is ori-

ented towards the commercial market, and takes for

granted that users are specialists rather than learners,

which in turn makes the access to these servers quite

difﬁcult for learners.

The game itself is not the sole purpose of the

above-mentioned chess server. Indeed, its main pur-

pose is to improve chess teaching in Brazilian pub-

lic schools (comprising elementary school till high

school), particularly aiming at reducing and optimis-

ing the teaching time. The main purpose of our work

is to call attention to the different users proﬁles that

must be taken into account when designing the server,

the differences between learners and specialists, the

concern towards the needs of these learners so that

they are properly oriented rather than being directly

exposed to the specialists community. We intend,

therefore, to develop a community that comprises dif-

ferent user’s proﬁles ((Direne et al., 2004); (Feitosa

and Direne, 2006)).

Even though there is an interface solution for this

chess server through the web, it does not fulﬁl the

current teaching and/or learning requirements that the

Brazilian Education Department established concern-

ing chess as an extracurricular activity. Moreover, the

interaction takes place almost entirely in a console

window by means of command line, which, in this

case, requires great cognitiveeffort from learner-users

(which actually is the target proﬁle of the project) ex-

cluding them from the chess community, contributing

thus to an unnecessary sophistication of the environ-

ment. The interface and interaction environment we

describe here is innovative within the context of the

available chess servers, both fulﬁlling the demands

and suiting the purposes of the chess server upon

which it is based.

Our main thesis is that it is possible to correct the

ﬂaws of the access tools available today, and therefore

help learner-users to overcome the difﬁculties im-

posed by the unnecessary sophistication of the chess

community. In order to come up with a solution,

we went through the literature of a number of areas.

In addition to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) e

some of its supporting theories – particularly Semi-

otics Engineering (de Souza, 2004) –, we also looked

into the state of the art discussion on Educational In-

formatics (EI) and, consequently, into the relevance

of computer-supported educational games. Further-

more, since the chess server in question is an online

server for web games, our research was extended to

educational games through the web, particularly in

multi-user environments.

262

Picussa J., S. García L., Bueno J., V. R. Ferreira M., I. Direne A., C. E. de Bona L., Silva F., A. Castilho M. and S. Sunye M. (2008).

A USER-INTERFACE ENVIRONMENT SOLUTION AS AN EDUCATIONAL TOOL FOR AN ONLINE CHESS SERVER ON THE WEB.

In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - HCI, pages 262-267

DOI: 10.5220/0001707602620267

 SciTePress

2 LITERATURE

2.1 Educational Informatics

Nowadays, a number of software can be considered

educational software. According to (Vicari and Gi-

raffa, 1996), an educational software must meet the

needs of its users and possess pedagogic purposes.

They also add that every software may be considered

educational as long as its use is inserted in a context

and situation of teaching-learning in which a speciﬁc

methodology guides the work.

A branch of Educational Informatics that can be

largely explored is the use of software of educational

games. The game deﬁnition is polemic. One deﬁni-

tion say that, game is a free activity in which one pro-

ceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and

space according to ﬁxed rules and in an orderly man-

ner. It is not everyday life, it is outside the process

of directly satisfying needs and desires (Huizinga,

1971).

For (Vicari and Giraffa, 1996), the main purpose

of an educational game is to make knowledge absorp-

tion and the work with learners signiﬁcantly easier,

helping to explore their cognitive skills. Spontaneity

must never be sacriﬁced in the name of knowledge ac-

quisition because the greatest beneﬁt of a game is to

allow learners to express their own decisions (Frbel,

quoted by (Kishimoto, 1992)).

The use of computer-supported games for educa-

tional purposes leads to an increase in student motiva-

tion, and teaches students to persist when faced with

challenges and new tasks (Tarouco et al., 2004).

Experts in the area of computer educational games

assert that there is a tendency towards the use of

strategic educational games since they help students

develop intellectually. This kind of game offers simu-

lations in which users apply knowledge they acquired

in class in order to improve their performance in the

competitive environment. Chess, for instance, has

been used for educational purposes for many years.

2.1.1 Educational Games through the Web and

Multi-user Environments

Educational games through the web are tools that

add to the teaching-learning process and provide stu-

dents with data gathering and processing, asynchro-

nous learning, real-time interaction among geograph-

ically dispersed people, as well as a dynamic scenario

(Tarouco et al., 2004). Such interactive environment

is called multi-user environment. A number of com-

puter educational games have been expanded through

the web, following Internet advances, leading thus to

the development of multi-user educational games; in

other words, users geographically apart or not are able

to interact through computational networks.

In a multi-user environment, users must inter-

act both amongst themselves and with the system

(Grudin, 1994). Educational Informatics and the area

of HCI have both been joining efforts in order to

build adequate environments that embody the above-

mentioned features.

2.2 Chess and Educational Informatics

Teaching strategies are rather close to chess strategies,

in which dialectics and self-criticism play a central

role, and in which the loser proﬁts more than the win-

ner. From a moral point of view, chess establishes

an ethical conduct through the losing and winning ex-

periences, which in turn can be used by the teacher

when analysing matches and commenting on the stu-

dents mistakes (S´a, 1988).

Traditionally, the teaching of chess takes place

through books that contain a series of schemes and

speciﬁc methods associated to a set of chess positions.

Generalising such methods may be quite a difﬁcult

task to students since they may not be able to ﬁnd

possible applications to the content they learnt.

With the help of computer science the teaching

of chess may potentially be enriched since the for-

mer comprises educational features, collective use,

application of heuristic uses and knowledge, among

other things. However, nowadays there are only a

few groups who dedicate themselves to exploring and

applying computational tools and theories in order to

better the process of chess teaching-learning.

2.2.1 Interface and Interactive Environments of

Chess Servers on the Web

Nowadays there are a number of chess servers avail-

able on the web, among which the entire environment

of the vast majority – including the interface and in-

teractive environment – does not possess an educa-

tional approach, focusing on other issues such as com-

mercial interest (even charging users fees to use the

server), for instance. Such servers may be considered

mere substitutes of the ordinary chess board and hu-

man opponent.

The servers that do possess an educational ap-

proach are available as prototypes and do not have

an interface environment through the web that meets

the educational needs. Despite the attempt to stimu-

late the learners development through the game, such

servers do not dispose of an environment that em-

bodies educational approaches so as to beneﬁt the

A USER-INTERFACE ENVIRONMENT SOLUTION AS AN EDUCATIONAL TOOL FOR AN ONLINE CHESS

SERVER ON THE WEB

263

most frequent users proﬁle, namely learner. These en-

vironments were gradually developed incrementally

by the chess community, whose sole concern was to

allow for chess playing without thinking of making

things easier on beginners. When accessing the sys-

tem, these beginners face a structure and a technical,

sophisticated language which at ﬁrst excludes them

from the community, as well as from chess learning.

3 METHODOLOGY

The XadrezLivre chess server upon which we based

our research has been in operation for over5 years. Its

interaction through command language is based upon

the international standard Free Internet Chess Server

(FICS), which in turn is a protocol used for chess

servers in order to offer, through the Internet, the min-

imum required features in order for games among var-

ious users to take place.

The interface solution described in the present ar-

ticle offers a graphic environment that does not re-

quire the use of commands via console. However,

aiming at giving the graphical interface the full ex-

pressive potential of the FICS language and, simul-

taneously, fulﬁlling the standards found in this sort of

tool and considered references by the communitycon-

cerned, we elaborated a speciﬁc methodology which

we shall describe next.

The methodology we used for deﬁning the user-

interface environment consisted of two elements,

namely (i) studying the formal language of chess

speciﬁcation and (ii) empirically analysing the chess

server environments available. These steps were car-

ried out in parallel and separately by different mem-

bers of the projects HCI sub-teams, who in turn coop-

eratively described the functionality speciﬁcation for

the new version of the server. Once this initial stage

was concluded, we arranged meetings with users to

clear their doubts and hear their feedback, aiming at

performing necessary adjustments so as to fully sup-

port the teaching of chess in schools.

3.1 Formal Fics Language

We already have a widespread formal language for

playing chess through the Internet. It is a command

language, and such commands were studied so as to

identify their individual potential, and thus the exist-

ing possibilities, be it for the game itself or for com-

munication among users, which is extremely impor-

tant for the access of new users – chess learners.

In addition to that, aiming at identifying hier-

archies and semantic associations, we classiﬁed the

commands and put a conceptual model together. The

outcome of such exhaustive work was, on the one

hand, the context information, required for making

server use by beginners easier and, on the other hand,

the speciﬁcation of the interface structure capable of

granting direct access to actions in the various use sit-

uations.

3.2 Chess Servers on the Web

In parallel with the above-mentioned formal language

study, we also performed an analysis of some of the

most prominent open (free of charge) online chess

servers from the point of view of both interface and

interaction. The environments we analysed were

those that allowed for interaction – including the

game itself – by using a browser.

The main purpose of such analysis was to list the

existing functionalities and identify the ones consid-

ered indispensable for a chess environment of this

kind. Even though these environments do not have

the same purpose as our hypothetical server – whose

aim is educational –, they revealed functionalities and

basic requirements that must be offered to chess play-

ers in general.

3.3 What Specialists and Server Users

have to Say

The team that worked on the development of the

XadrezLivre chess server is multidisciplinary, and

consists of sub-teams in charge of the Server (man-

aged by specialists and senior users of the chess com-

munity), Database, Coding, Human-Computer Inter-

action and Education. This collective view, inherent

to the project, allowed for the design of the interface

environment with the ongoing participation of differ-

ent users proﬁles in the process.

The contribution of the senior users of the server

who took part in the meetings, we can say that they

have been using the system since its implementation,

also playing the role of system managers. Because

they are thoroughly acquainted with the community,

they were fully able to point out some of the usual dif-

ﬁculties beginners and intermediate users face during

the interaction with the system. Besides, they helped

us to choose the functionalities by means of a classi-

ﬁcation by relative frequency relevance of the FICS

commands.

As for the specialists and educators was rather sig-

niﬁcant, assisting us in the selection of terminology

and identiﬁcation of features necessary to the game

environment so as to fulﬁl the objective of our project,

i.e. to support the teaching of chess in schools.

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Figure 1: Interface and interactive environment solution for the project’s chess server.

4 SOLUTION DESCRIPTION

The methodology used allowed us to develop a solu-

tion for the interface and interactive environment for

the projects chess server in accordance with our main

objective – of supporting chess teaching in schools.

Figure 1 shows the layout of the main screen and its

windows.

It is essential to point out that the entire design

of the environment, including the board and pieces,

was elaborated especially for the project. Figure 1

shows that we placed special emphasis on the access

to context information of the communitys activities,

denoting the innovating nature of this technological

tool that allows for direct access to contextually sig-

niﬁcant information. This was possible thanks to the

selection and remodelling of functionalities combined

with the design of the interface elements, which in

turn are parts of the methodology that shall be de-

scribed next.

4.1 Board: The Game Environment

The board constitutes the very game environment. As

we show in Figure 1, the board takes the central por-

tion of the environment. It includes a clock for each

player, the names of the players, a key of symbols

concerning the colours of the pieces, a window dis-

playing the PGN (Portable Game Notation) moves

and a window that displays the punctuation during a

match.

A typical problem of online chess environments

is when newcomers are instantly invited to play by

ill-intentioned experienced players. This happens

because such experienced users want to accumu-

late more victories, thus bettering their rating. This

bad conduct makes the environment unfavourable for

learners, discouraging them from playing. The inter-

face solution we used to try to combat this problem

is the following: the moment a beginner is invited

to play by an experienced learner (which can be eas-

ily visualized through the players ratings), the former

gets a message in his/her game settings window warn-

ing him/her of the possibly ill intention of the latter,

thus avoiding the complete “massacre”.

Once the match is over, an important feature – vis-

-vis the teaching-learning environment – is the possi-

bility to take notes during the match and then save

them. This enables both user-learners to take notes

of what might have been their ﬂaws, and teachers to

write comments while watching a match, so that they

can use them later in class or simply make them avail-

able for students.

4.2 User’s Proﬁles

The user’s proﬁles of the vast majority of the online

chess environments are classiﬁed in such a way that

does not include learners. Furthermore, in many of

such servers the different users proﬁles are displayed

through text interface, thus allowing for differentia-

tion by means of special characters, such as an aster-

A USER-INTERFACE ENVIRONMENT SOLUTION AS AN EDUCATIONAL TOOL FOR AN ONLINE CHESS

SERVER ON THE WEB

265

isk right next to a nickname. Since there usually are

a great number of proﬁles (some servers have from

10 to 15), it is extremely difﬁcult to differ simply by

adding a special character.

Since our suggested solution privileges the active

learner proﬁle, we had to re-elaborate all users pro-

ﬁles, which eventually led us to a list of 5 proﬁles, as

follows: the Manager, in charge of the well-being of

the system; the Robot, that allows other users to in-

vite him/her to play to help him/her to practice; the

Helper, whose main task is to help newcomers to use

the environment; the Teacher, who is in charge of giv-

ing tips and developinga teaching environment within

the server; and the common User.

The STATUS column displays the solution for dif-

ferent players statuses. As we show in Figure 2, they

may be “busy”, “available”, “absent”, “not available

to play”, “participating in a tournament”, and “watch-

ing match”.

Figure 2: Different icons for different proﬁles, status and

titles.

Most chess servers attribute titles to their users ac-

cording to the tiles they have in real life (Grand Mas-

ter, International Master, among others).

However, such hierarchy is not clear for inexpe-

rienced users. Therefore, in order to soften the dif-

ﬁculty our interface solution includes different icons

for each proﬁle, and they can be distinguished through

other symbols (such as a crown) when the user has a

speciﬁc title, as shown in the column “TITLES” of

Figure 2. Considering that most chess servers have

more than 5 types of titles, instead of unnecessarily

overloading the list of users/contacts we preferred to

have our solution communicate whether users have

titles or not, displaying the type of title only when

detailed information is requested, which can be done

easily by means of the speciﬁc icon.

4.3 Top Contact Bar

Aiming at providing users with direct access to the

contextually signiﬁcant actions by means of strategic

and operational help, we inserted a context bar on the

top portion of the environment.

Thanks to the methodology we adopted, we were

able to choose the most signiﬁcant functionalities for

the entire environment, which in turn were placed in

the context bar, mostly. Each option of the bar has its

respective menu of available actions for each user.

The ﬁrst option of the context menu bar is “On-

going matches”. The environment interface allows

users to directly access the ongoing matches by click-

ing this button. Its corresponding menu displays the

ongoing matches stored in the system, which natu-

rally can be observed by other users. Right next to it

is the “Announced matches” option, through which

the interface displays a list of announced matches.

The interface also allows users to have access to such

matches and to accept the ones they wish to. Quick

access to a certain match is possible in a rather simple

way, as follows: when users want to be challenged,

the interface allows them to announce a match as

well as the settings chosen for such match. The third

button of the context bar is entitled “Tournaments”,

whereby all ongoing tournaments are displayed (also

allowing users to check the ongoing matches), as well

as scheduled tournaments. This way, users can reg-

ister quite easily simply by double clicking the cho-

sen tournament. The last option of the context bar is

“Rooms”, where the users may send and receive mes-

sages to a certain user or to all users present in the

chat room in which they are taking part.

4.4 Interactive Monitor: Help for

Learners

The vast majority of chess environments available

does not instruct learner-users when they are faced

with difﬁculties whilst playing, be these difﬁculties

due to distraction or due to lack of knowledge of the

rules or of game experience.

As a solution for the abovementioned shortcom-

ings we propose the addition, to the interaction and

interface environment, of an interactive monitor to

help learners. Such help plays the role of a metaphori-

cal teacher who watches his/her students matches and

comments on key moments of the game, i.e. those

moments in which learners are prone to make mis-

takes. We speciﬁed certain error situations by means

of a classiﬁcation of common errors typical of learn-

ers.

For example, impossible moves and an instance of

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266

it is when players misplace a piece. The online chess

environments do not allow users to misplace pieces

by automatically placing them in their original posi-

tion, giving users a second chance to make their move.

However, despite the fact that the system takes such

action, it does not inform users as to the reason why

their move was not allowed, nor does it help learners

to improve their knowledge of the correct position of

chess pieces.

In the proposed chess environment, the idea is

to monitor the abovementioned situations, providing

user-learners with the necessary help by means of

messages and warnings containing the information re-

quired to fulﬁl their lack of knowledge. The purpose

of this monitor is not to make users more competitive,

not is it to make them less eager. The objective of the

interactivemonitor is rather to warn users both in dan-

gerous situations and in situations of error by hinting

at the solution without, however, giving out the whole

answer.

5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

PERSPECTIVES

Departing from the initial hypothesis problem that

learners have difﬁculty getting motivated to fully en-

joy chess server environments – which is so often

mentioned in the computer-based chess community

–, we strived to ﬁnd a theoretical basis in Human-

Computer Interaction and particularly in Semiotics

Engineering to develop an interface and interactive

environment capable of privileging communication

among and with user-learners, which in turn consti-

tuted the main objective of our server – thus attending

to the needs of this speciﬁc proﬁle.

The methodology we developed especially for

building the interface had its grounds in the differ-

ential features of the project, or more speciﬁcally in

the existence of a formal language (FICS) with full

expressivity for the chess community, as well as in

the multi-disciplinary nature of our team, which in

turn allowed for the ongoing and active analysis of

different potential users proﬁles all through the de-

sign process. This way, we carried out the studying,

classiﬁcation and modelling of the formal language in

parallel, and we also performed the empirical analysis

of the features of chess servers available on the Inter-

net, as well as a study to develop a resourceful game

environment which fulﬁlls the lack of knowledge of

learners during games. Our methodology, which used

alternativelythe top-down and bottom-up approaches,

was gradually shaped during the periodic meetings

with different users, whose main purpose was to de-

termine the importance and relative frequency of the

commands, the most common terms used in the chess

community,as well the learners speciﬁc needs, among

other things.

Therefore, the interface and interaction environ-

ment we developed meets the needs of a commu-

nity whose main concern is to privilege learner-users.

Such concern becomes clear in the interface through

the interactive monitor that provides users with help

during games by warning them about typical error sit-

uations; and through the bar of context menus, which

in turn displays the entire potential of the environment

basically by means of the context information, pro-

viding users with direct access to actions semantically

associated to each menu.

Future works in this area should approach the im-

plementation of the environment (which is already be-

ing carried out), as well as the shift between competi-

tion and cooperation with educational purposes.

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SERVER ON THE WEB

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