Intelligence Builders
The Strata System is the integrated data and application platform that supports the Mission HydroSci project. It provides authentication, gameplay delivery, data collection, state persistence, automated assessment, and teacher-facing dashboards within a unified architecture.
The system is designed specifically for educational research and classroom deployment. It enables students to interact with the Mission HydroSci game while preserving their progress, capturing gameplay interactions as structured data, and automatically evaluating and presenting performance to teachers in near-real-time.
The Strata System consists of four primary components:
Authentication, user access, game delivery, and the teacher-facing dashboard
Gameplay event capture and analytics data store
Game state and player settings preservation across sessions
Automated evaluation of student performance against curriculum-aligned criteria
Together, these components form a complete pipeline from gameplay to actionable classroom insights. Each component is described in detail in its own section of this report.
The system collects only gameplay interaction data and game state information necessary for assessment, research, and session continuity.
At a high level, the Strata System operates as a coordinated set of independent services:
Each service operates independently but is designed to interoperate through shared databases and a common authentication model. This separation allows individual components to be updated, restarted, or scaled without disrupting the rest of the system.
The Strata System operates through a continuous data pipeline that connects student gameplay to teacher-visible progress evaluations:
This pipeline operates continuously and automatically. No manual grading is required. Teachers see near-real-time progress evaluations as students play.
StrataHub is the central platform through which all users interact with the system. It manages authentication and user access across multiple schools and classrooms, launches the game with secure session credentials, organizes users into workspaces, organizations, and groups that mirror the structure of the research deployment, and hosts the MHS Dashboard where teachers and researchers monitor student progress.
For full details, see StrataHub.
StrataLog captures detailed gameplay events in near-real-time as students play Mission HydroSci. Each event carries both a client timestamp (when the action occurred on the student's device) and a server timestamp (when it was received), ensuring accurate timing analysis regardless of network conditions. StrataLog is the primary data source for both automated assessment and research analysis.
For full details, see StrataLog.
StrataSave saves and restores two categories of player data: game state (where the student is in the game and what they have accomplished within gameplay) and player settings (personal preferences such as audio volume and character appearance). It ensures continuity across sessions and maintains multiple save points per student with configurable retention policies.
For full details, see StrataSave.
The MHS Grader continuously polls and processes StrataLog events to evaluate student performance at 26 curriculum-aligned progress points across the five units of Mission HydroSci. Each progress point has its own grading rule that defines the criteria for passing or being flagged. The grader produces structured progress evaluations with detailed metrics that are displayed on the MHS Dashboard.
For full details, see MHS Grader.
The Strata System is designed to meet the needs of both classroom instruction and educational research:
The Strata System enables a level of insight into student learning that is not achievable with traditional educational tools.
Teachers can monitor student progress in near-real-time and identify students who may benefit from additional support. The color-coded dashboard provides an immediate overview of an entire classroom, and detailed metrics allow teachers to understand the specific nature of a student's difficulty rather than receiving only a pass or fail indicator.
Researchers can analyze detailed learning behaviors across the full sequence of student interactions with the game. Because StrataLog captures the timing, sequence, and context of each gameplay action, the research dataset supports analysis of how students learn, not just whether they succeed. This granularity is essential for studying learning processes in game-based environments.
By integrating gameplay delivery, data collection, automated assessment, and visualization into a single platform, the Strata System provides a complete infrastructure for both supporting and studying learning in the Mission HydroSci project.
The Strata System is a purpose-built platform that transforms student gameplay into near-real-time assessment and research insights. Through its four core components, StrataHub, StrataLog, StrataSave, and the MHS Grader, it transforms gameplay interactions into structured data, evaluates performance automatically, and presents actionable results to educators.
Each component is described in detail in its own section of this report:
Together, they serve as the foundation for both classroom use and the research objectives of the Mission HydroSci project.