A critical reflection on the potential of mobile device based tools to assist in the professional evaluation and assessment of observable aspects of learning or (game) playing

In the past few years a large amount of work has been done in the field of games based learning, mainly with respect to computer based applications. However there have been other, much older and traditional areas of (or related to) games based learning that have also received drastically increased attention from the research community in recent years. The public interest in matters concerning paedagogics has literally exploded, an observation reflected in the coverage by the mainstream media. In previous work the authors have reported on practical hands on studies from the classroom (J. Hildmann) or proposed a formalism designed to represent unambiguous descriptions of observable aspects of learning or (game) playing (H. Hildmann). In this paper aforementioned formal approach is linked to innovative approaches for behavioural evaluation of children and experiential paedagogics, in specific to initiative games. The background of the authors allows the merger of the theoretical contribution from the field of computing with the practical considerations, criticism and requirements of an expert "in the field", i.e. one of those professions that will ultimately be using these new approaches as well as judging and evaluating them.