Teacher in the Loop: Customizing Educational Games Using Natural Language

Nacir Bouali, Nacir Bouali, Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Markku Tukiainen

2025

Abstract

Despite significant advances in educational technology and design methodologies, current educational games demonstrate a fundamental limitation: educators are unable to modify content after the games are deployed, limiting curriculum alignment and pedagogical customization. This paper introduces Imikathen-VR, a solution built upon a text-to-animation system, supporting K-1 and K-2 teachers to create minigames for their students to practice basic writing skills. Our implementation extends an existing animation pipeline by integrating a fine-tuned T5 model for sentence simplification, achieving 95% F1 BERT score and 76% ROUGE-L score in maintaining semantic and lexical fidelity. We improve visual reasoning by transforming the task of identifying missing visual details into a Masked Language Modeling problem. Preliminary results demonstrate the system’s effectiveness in generating curriculum-aligned VR exercises, though comprehensive classroom testing remains pending. This work advances the integration of customizable VR technology in early education, providing teachers with enhanced control over educational content.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Bouali N., Cavalli-Sforza V. and Tukiainen M. (2025). Teacher in the Loop: Customizing Educational Games Using Natural Language. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU; ISBN 978-989-758-746-7, SciTePress, pages 446-457. DOI: 10.5220/0013480500003932

in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu25,
author={Nacir Bouali and Violetta Cavalli-Sforza and Markku Tukiainen},
title={Teacher in the Loop: Customizing Educational Games Using Natural Language},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU},
year={2025},
pages={446-457},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013480500003932},
isbn={978-989-758-746-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU
TI - Teacher in the Loop: Customizing Educational Games Using Natural Language
SN - 978-989-758-746-7
AU - Bouali N.
AU - Cavalli-Sforza V.
AU - Tukiainen M.
PY - 2025
SP - 446
EP - 457
DO - 10.5220/0013480500003932
PB - SciTePress