Starting with the evaluations

Josef gave a presentation on Serious Gaming. Future research will include the field of Game Design and some additional informations on how games communicate knowledge and what exactly their target group is. Then he built a small experimentation area for the AVALON project in Second Life (REEL Island). He created the objects as derscribed in a mail from Markus E. and imported the different scripts. There seems to be a problem with the .zip file, that should be created by the CMS. Furthermore he supported Ingo in conducting his evaluation and collected some papers on Game Design.

Ingo started with the usability evaluations where a total of 10 persons did complete the evaluation in the first week. In general the test users did not have any major problems in using the environment and all of them completed the test successfully. The framework was also quite stable and only crashed two times in all the evaluation sessions. In terms of participation we have troubles finding test persons. First we did sent out calls with no incentive and did get nearly no replies. We then started to offer a 10 Euro Amazon gift certificate as incentive. This boosted the interest and we did get more replies, but we still did not reach our anticipated 24 test persons. We then prolonged the evaluation period for the next two weeks and did sent out the call a third time. We could reach some more people, but far less than we had reached in the second call. At the present time it looks as if we will only be able to recruit 16 to 20 people.

Markus had a deeper look into the data available in the e-tourism database dump. Unfortunately the only data included is raw unormalized text fetched from various non tourism related web sites. Therefore it’s not really an e-tourism database dump at all The data structure for the extraction of terms and POS is already part of the database model but these tables are empty. Therefore it seems as if we need to build our knowledge store from scratch.