This paper summarizes the findings of a study on difficulty perception conducted with players of 2D side-scrolling platform games which level design is automatically created. The primary goal of our research, is to offer players a suitable experience that matches their abilities and the difficulty of the games they play. The study presented here was conducted to test the calculations and formulas designed for a method that adapts the difficulty of a level according to the player skills through level design. We created a new method that combines Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment and the principle of Graph Grammars to create levels with a specific degree of difficulty, the novelty of our method lies on the use of Graph Grammars as a tool for creating multipath levels in 2D platformers; an implementation of Graph Grammars applied to 2D platformers; the creation of formulas that numerically estimate difficulty and insights about the perception of difficulty. Results show that the difficulty estimation of our method and the difficulty perceived by participants of our experiment has a correlation coefficient of 0.75, with a linear relationship and a strong correlation between both variables, demonstrating that the approach is heading to the right direction. In addition, difficulty and performance have a correlation of -0.69, which shows an inversely proportional relationship, more difficult levels have lower performance than easier levels; for this particular research this was an expected result, confirming the method is doing the calculations properly

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Technology has been increasingly implemented as an effective tool to help improve student’s ability to comprehend their environment, develop design solutions and estimate the appropriateness of their proposed designs. Through simulations, the students can visualize the performance of their design and anticipate unexpected complications. Technologies have also been proven as a useful tool to help higher education student’s grasp disaster situations outbreak and their consequences. Among the field of disaster mitigation and prevention, the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) has been described as an adequate tool to simulate flame spread rate during fire outbreaks, as well as smoke flow. However, this tool is not considered accessible to students because of its elaborated features that can be challenging to understand and time-consuming to render. The EDISON Platform, a hub that provides accessible simulation solutions for students free of charge, was used as the host to create the Graphical User Interface (GUI) FDS Module. The proposal implemented a GUI for the FDS tool, facilitating the simulation process while addressing three main challenges for students to access the existing version of FDS. The current FDS version requires programming logic understanding from the users. For example, the construction of the FDS files is based on Namelists and Command Line Interface (CLI) is used to render the model. Furthermore, three different environments are needed to complete each simulation. In the suggested GUI FDS Module, all the procedures required for simulation completion can be done within one environment and no programming knowledge is necessary. Secondly, since the GUI FDS Module runs the simulation on the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) supercomputer, the simulation is expected to be done faster than if rendered using the student’s personal computer. Finally, even though the current version of FDS is downloadable without any charge, it is common that users find the FDS excessively complicated and select one of the available commercial GUI versions of FDS when doing fire assessment and research. The proposed GUI FDS Module will provide an FDS GUI option free of charge and open to the community, focused on higher degree students.

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