Significance of dynamic difficulty adjustment in delivering instructional scaffolding on educational game for high school chemistry subject

The subject of chemistry is a generally despised subject by high school students due to its complexity, the accusation, however, is not baseless as chemistry actually requires multiple levels of thinking. The topic of reaction rate in high school chemistry is one of the more complicated ones. The current method of delivery for chemistry, in general, is still quite conventional; as such, the conventional approach only delivers knowledge is a one-way approach and lacks conceptual thinking. The existence of educational games as educational technology and its versatility shows some potency to improve the status quo. Related to the versatility, the educational game can be adapted with some degree of modification in the form of an algorithm such as dynamic difficulty adjustment. The concept of dynamic difficulty adjustment aligns similarly with the educational concept of instructional scaffolding by adapting students' performance and modify future levels as a form of scaffolding. This study aims to verify the existence of conceptual thinking improvements via an educational game designed with dynamic difficulty adjustment, which to an extent, delivers a form of visual instructional scaffolding. The study results show that educational game, in general, is able to deliver conceptual thinking based on the experiment conducted however the role of the algorithm adapted might not be the only deciding factor in an educational game context. The study also presents the experimental setup used as well as its analysis, its weakness, as well as its limitation, are also thoroughly elaborated.