Implementation of an educational game to teach the digital file system

With the prevalence of computer technology in today’s society, digital and computer skills have become a vital part of everyday life. Due to this, it is important that members of the public have the knowledge necessary to fully make use of computers, both for their work and personal lives. Towards that end, an educational game was made to teach late middle and early high school students about the file system. The game is a 2D platformer intended to teach about file system operations (such as the creation and deletion of files) along with file system organization. This is done by placing in-game obstacles that require specific file operations to be performed in the real file system in order to be bypassed. This system uses adaptive difficulty (an aspect of adaptive learning) to adjust challenges to match student skill, and automatic item generation to create new levels as needed. The results of testing are still being analyzed, so this paper is limited to the design of the system.