Bringing Authoring Tools for Intelligent Tutoring Systems and Serious Games Closer Together: Integrating GIFT with the Unity Game Engine

In an effort to bring intelligent tutoring system (ITS) authoring tools closer to content authoring tools, the authors are working to integrate GIFT with the Unity game engine and editor. The paper begins by describing challenges faced by modern intelligent tutors and the motivation behind the integration effort, with special consideration given to how this work will better meet the needs of future serious games. The next three sections expand on these major hurdles more thoroughly, followed by proposed design enhancements that would allow GIFT to overcome these issues. Finally, an overview is given of the authors’ current progress towards implementing the proposed design. The key contribution of this work is an abstraction of the interface between intelligent tutoring systems and serious games, thus enabling ITS authors to implement more complex training behaviors.