A Self-adaptive Mechanism for Serious Quiz Games

Serious quiz games can provide an entertaining way to assess knowledge and promote learning. Motivation of the players can be increased by presenting quiz questions in the order of increasing difficulty or by presenting many different quiz questions during subsequent quiz sessions. However, maintaining a question set to adjust difficulty ratings for the target audience and to avoid early repetitions of questions can be a challenging task that requires constant effort. The paper presents a self-adaptive mechanism that is able to solve both tasks without collecting any explicit information about the anonymous target audience. The evaluation demonstrates that a quiz with about 600 questions on 15 difficulty levels has been maintained successfully over several years and more than 100'000 quiz sessions with minimal manual intervention.