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Towards a mobile serious game environment for children self-learning

Charles Gouin-Vallerand *, Susan M. Ferreira, Richard Hotte

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Context (1/2)

  • Still 58 million children, roughly between the ages of 6 and 11, out of school globally

(UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) & UNICEF, 2015).

  • Disproportionate emphasis into providing physical access to computers and Internet without adequate attention on how these technologies could be used to actually impacts human development (M Warschauer, 2004), (Johri & Pal, 2012) & (Ferreira, Sayago, & Blat, 2016).

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Context (2/2)

The value of serious game has been recognized and vast amount of games have been designed to contribute for children’s education.

In the past 10 years, the field of learning games has grown dramatically(Groff, Clark-Midura, Owen, Rosenheck, & Beall, 2015)

Serious Games (SGs) are gaining ever more interest as an instructional tool(Arnab et al., 2015)

Educational games are being backed up in the Technology-Enhanced Learning domain as strategies that can lead to worthy learning outcomes.(Melero & Hernández-Leo, 2014)

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Objectives

Developping a serious game on tablet that will teach basic of english and math for children from 4-5 years old

  • Focuses on providing education in lieu of regular schooling.

Designing a model based on a narrative where children have to play minigames to unlock artifacts (magical items or ingredients) to progress in the narration.

However from an HCI perspective, for a serious game to be effective, it need to be :

  • Fun : gamification, enjoyable, no frustrations, etc.
  • Usable : simple interaction, avoid input errors, etc.
  • Effective : bring knowledge+competencies, maintain motivation & engagement, etc.

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Research Team

  • 1 senior researcher in serious game and disruptive learning
  • 1 senior researcher in HCI
    • 1 postdoc fellow in HCI
  • 1 senior teacher at primary school
  • 1 Ph.D. candidate in persuasive technology
  • 1 junior software engineer

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Game prototype (1/5)

Learning gaming scenarios based on a RPG model :

For the purpose of our proof of concept, we developped 1 introduction narration + 3 learning mini-games and 1 bridge quest / game

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Game prototype (2/5)

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Game prototype (3/5)

3 mini-games

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Game prototype (4/5)

1 bridge animation + 1 bridge activity

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Game prototype (5/5)

Prototype was developed with Unity

  • Design last 2-3 months, Development last around 3-4 months with 2 designers + 1 developper

Designed specifically for the Datawind Ubislate tablet (Android version 4.2)

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Experimentation

Prototype was tested with :

  • 16 children + 13 parents (for technology background questionnaire)
  • 15 children of 4 years old + 1 child of 5
  • 8 girls + 8 boys

Experimentation was made in a public Kindergarten on the south shore of Montreal, Canada

  • multicultural and mostly poor to middle class families

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Methodology

  • Pretest for Math and English background
  • Playing 3 mini-games + bridge quest-game
  • Post-test to verify Math and English learning

2 researchers (1 taking notes + stats, 1 guide)

  • Guide was only helping when children were asking for help

1 camera was recording over the shoulder, game logs + observation notes

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Results - Children background

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Results - Gaming

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Activity 1

1:54 minutes

Activity 2

1:52 minutes

Activity 3

3:19 minutes

Activity 4

5:00 minutes

Gaming average time

Children scores on game aspects

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Results - Learning

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Numbers

Word in English

Pre Test

Mean = 5.5, sd = 2.61

Mean = 2.56, sd = 1.36

Post Test

Mean = 5.94, sd = 2.46

Mean = 3.12, sd = 1.59

Pre and Post Tests Score

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Future work

  • Analysis of user traces and video to
    • Analyse children-tablet interaction to find :
      • Occurrence of errors
      • Interaction strategies : finger used, position of hands on tablets, etc.
  • Develop more mini-games + bridge quests
    • Setup a more longitudinal experimentation

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Thank you for your attention!

Project supported by :

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Children-Machine Interactions

Continuously developing motor skills

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Interaction Issues

Design recommendations / Solutions

Touch and pointing Misses

Difficulty to touch small objects.

• Use recommended target sizes.

• Increase widgets active area: out-of-bound touches

The younger children had trouble with edge padded targets. (mobile-phones)

Align targets to edge of screen, or count edge touches.

Holdover touches

Accidentally touch the screen with their other hand”

Use timing and location of touches and interface widgets to identify and ignore holdover touches.

Touch time variations

Variations in touch timemisinterpreting actions. E.g.: double-click X two single clicks.

Less sensitivity and more robust error detection.

Drag and drop

Difficulties with drag and drop, children 4 to 9.

Apply only for short distances

Multi touch

Children tended to focus on the movement of one finger/target rather then on both targets

Avoid multi-touch interactions or use them with caution. (specially multi-touch drag and drop)

Gestures

Children’s gestures were recognized more poorly then adults.

E.g. Confused Gesture: plus/X, A/K.

Train recognizers specifically to problematic pairs.

Provide visual feedback

Don’t include unfamiliar gestures.

Test new gesture in advance.

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Children-Machine Interactions

Continuously developing motor skills

Hold only one thing at memory at time (Bruckman & Bandlow, 2002).

Process limited amount of information: reduce the among of information on screen.

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Cognitive aspects

Design recommendations

Centralization: focus attention to one characteristic.

Graphical dimension of objects could reflect their importance. Make targets stand out by form and position inside a larger group.

Symbols makes children faster and more efficient.

Symbolic graphical items could inform where and when to touch.

Easily distracted: click on any visible feature. May repeat several times if there is a sound feedback.

Hide advanced tools

Egocentrism: Difficulties to understand someone else’s viewpoint. Difficulties understanding others touch screen differently.

Accept different ways of touching screen as correct outputs. E.g.: Two or more fingers in contact with an object should trigger same effects as a single touch point.

Animism: Unanimated object have conscious

Provide children with instructions to make them aware of deterioration of devices. E.g.: “Mind not to drop it because de screen may be hurt”

Magical thinking: Associate simultaneous events with cause-effect relation

Wait some time from last touch event before showing results of some independent process