Release Notes 2022-1¶

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• Release Notes 2022-1
  • New Features
    • RIDE integration
    • XTSP
    • Local Video course object
  • Changes
    • xAPI
    • Course Editor Improvements
    • Game Master Improvements
    • Third Party Upgrades
    • Web Monitor
    • Misc.

New Features¶

RIDE integration¶

RIDE, the Rapid Integration & Development Environment developed by the USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) (https://ride.ict.usc.edu/), was integrated into GIFT for this release. With this integration comes a new scenario that is coupled with a few GIFT Courses and GIFT real-time assessments (DKFs) component. To see this integration in action please refer to STEEL-R RIDE Team Exemplar Courses.

This screenshot shows the RIDE course object that was added to the GIFT Course Creator allowing authors to drag-n-drop RIDE activity into the course flow.

This screenshot shows the RIDE role selection page where you select which role to play in the scenario.

This screenshot shows the RIDE in-game environment for the Exemplar Forest scenario instance.

XTSP¶

When editing a training application course object, the GIFT Course Creator can now import Extensible Training Service Package (XTSP) files that are created from the Experience Design Tool (XDT) and automatically convert them to Real-Time Assessment files (i.e. DKFs). Importing an XTSP will automatically populate the Real-time Assessment editor with tasks, a team organization, places of interest, and triggers based on the contents of the XTSP file.

Local Video course object¶

The GIFT course creator now allows local .mp4 video files to be uploaded and used in a course as course objects. Videos could be used in courses before this change, but only YouTube videos could be used as their own course objects.

Changes¶

xAPI¶

Survey Result - Somewhere along the way in upgrading GIFT's xAPI statement generation it lost the ability it had to write the score results of a survey that was answered. This has now been restored and adheres to the GIFT xAPI profile.

Reference: https://gifttutoring.org/projects/gift/wiki/XAPI_Statements_2022-1#Survey

Cognitive & Affective Learner State statements - In GIFT 2021-2 a significant effort was completed on creating statements for GIFT Performance Assessment (formative statements) and GIFT Publish Lesson Score (summative statements). In this release there is now support for writing statements on the Cognitive and Affective portions of a GIFT Learner State. This allows a course author to store the results of a scored survey (e.g. Grit, Motivation), the Knowledge level determined after the learner completes a Recall phase of an Adaptive Courseflow course object, and the Skill level determined after the learner completes a Real-time assessment activity (i.e. training application course object or Practice phase of an Adaptive courseflow course object - both need the appropriate authoring elements for this to work). It can also store the results of Affective classification done in the Learner module (e.g. using sensor data)

References:
https://gifttutoring.org/projects/gift/wiki/XAPI_Statements_2022-1#Cognitive-State
https://gifttutoring.org/projects/gift/wiki/XAPI_Statements_2022-1#Affective-State

Stress and difficulty value in

• Task Summative Assessment - the final task stress value and difficulty value, if available, are now included in this previously existing statement as additional attributes of the task. https://gifttutoring.org/projects/gift/wiki/XAPI_Statements_2022-1#Summative-assessment-scoring
• Environment Adaptation - the strategy's stress and difficulty value, if available, are now included in this previously existing statement as additional attributes of the strategy. https://gifttutoring.org/projects/gift/wiki/XAPI_Statements_2022-1#Environment-Adaptation

Over-riding Summative Assessments
Now that the OC/T can manage the Summative Assessment scores in the Game Master Past Session UI, there are two things that happen in xAPI:

• Void the previous statement - The original statement being overridden now has voided attribute with a value of true.
• Create a new statement - The new summative assessment statement created is almost an exact copy of the original except that the OC/T's username is used, the score value is changed to 'overridden', the provided assessment value is used (e.g. Above Expectation), there is a reference to the original (now voided) statement and the timestamp is new.

References:
https://gifttutoring.org/projects/gift/wiki/XAPI_Statements_2022-1#VoidingInvalidating-statements
https://gifttutoring.org/projects/gift/wiki/XAPI_Statements_2022-1#Summative-assessment-scoring

Course Editor Improvements¶

Tasks and strategies within Real-Time Assessments can now be assigned difficulty and stress ratings. Stress and difficulty values assigned in these editors will be reflected in the xAPI statements that are produced while the Real-Time Assessment is assessing performance.

Game Master Improvements¶

Summative Assessments¶

The previous release introduced a new dialog that could be used to change the summative assessment scores of real time assessment (DKF) concepts for a specific session. This dialog has been improved upon in several ways:

• Modifying a concept's summative assessment has been simplified. Instead of changing the summative assessments of the conditions underneath a concept, the concept's total summative score can be changed directly.
• Changing a child concept's summative assessment will now do a better job rolling up that assessment to any parent concepts and tasks.
• Comments and audio recordings can now be saved alongside summative assessments that are entered using the dialog

Additionally, summative assessments can now be seen in a session's timeline below the map for past sessions. When a past session is loaded, Game Master will now display its summative assessments in the timeline by default. The formative assessments that were displayed previously can still be accessed at the press of a button.

Stress and Difficulty¶

The aforementioned stress and difficulty values that are assigned to tasks and strategies can be seen in Game Master.

Icon Resizer¶

Game Master now includes the capability to resize symbology icons on the map; this allows users to increase or decrease the size of icons to facilitate easier review of symbology type or to see more map space.

Third Party Upgrades¶

We have upgraded from JDK 8 to OpenJDK 11. With this Java upgrade came several other third party upgrades as listed below:

• GWT → v2.7.0 to v2.9.0
• GWT Query  → v1.4.2 to v1.5.0
• Google Guice → v3.0 to v5.0.1
• GWTBootstrap  → v0.9.4 to v1.0.1 
• GWTBootstrap Extras  → v0.9.4 to v1.0.1
• Derby → v10.10.1.1 to v10.15.2.0
• Tincan With Dependencies → Tincan v1.1.2 jar is now standalone with dependencies added separately for easier maintainability
  • Lombok → v1.16.8 to v1.18.12
  • Dom4J → v1.6.0 to v2.1.0
• Javassist (JAVA programming ASSISTant) → v3.12.0 to v3.28.0

Added Libraries

• JAXB → v2.3.1
• JavaFX  → v11.0.2
• Zip4J  → v1.3.2
• Jackson Annotations → v2.12.5
• ActiveMQ → addition of 64 bit binary distribution for 64 bit JDKs

Replaced Libraries 

• db-derby-10.10.1.1-bin
• gwt-2.7.0
• gwtbootstrap-0.9.4
• gwtbootstrap-extras-0.9.4
• tincan-1.1.2-jar-with-dependencies
• javassist-3.12.0.GA
• dom4j-1.6.1

Furthermore GIFT no longer uses Java Web Start to deploy the GIFT Gateway module via a jnlp file. This experience is something you would have seen at the start of a GIFT course on GIFT Cloud that required a GIFT Gateway module to run on your computer. Now a simple zip containing the GIFT Gateway module is provided instead. This also removes the need for a code signing certificate in GIFT that was used to sign the Java Web Start files in order to pass your browser's security checks. In the future we plan on making the GIFT Gateway module persist across GIFT courses so that you don't have to download the zip each time you run a course in GIFT Cloud that requires the Gateway module.

Web Monitor¶

For administrators looking to host their own GIFT instances, several features that were previously exclusive to the standalone GIFT Monitor application are now accessible through the GIFT Dashboard. Users with the appropriate permissions (or any user running GIFT in Desktop mode) can selectively turn GIFT's modules on and off and can observe message traffic for both the GIFT system and any running domain sessions.

This feature can be particularly helpful in headless environments where Java UI panels like the GIFT Monitor application cannot be visualized.

Misc.¶

• Fixed problems where a running session sometimes wouldn't show up in the Active Sessions list in Game Master
• The internals of GIFT's launch processes have been changed to rely less on Windows .bat file scripting. Going forward, this will facilitate running GIFT on Unix-based operating systems.
• When creating a task start or stop trigger that fires based on an entity's location, the course creator now allows places of interest within the same real-time assessment to be selected as an alternative to entering coordinates manually.
• Reports created by the Publish Course page will now include the settings that were used alongside the usual report file for future reference.