From England to Uganda: Children Designing and Evaluating Serious Games

Abstract

The participation of end-users in the design and evaluation of technologies has long been an important principle in human-computer interaction. This article reports a study to ascertain to what extent children using participatory methods could effectively design for a surrogate population. Fifty children, from a UK primary school, participated in a design activity to specify a serious game for children in Uganda. The children's designs were analyzed and were shown to have effectively incorporated learning and gaming aspects. Based on these designs a serious game was developed. This new serious game and the commercial game Angry Birds were both evaluated for fun with 25 children in Uganda, using the Fun Toolkit and the This or That method. The results suggested that the children found both games fun, thus confirming that the children in the United Kingdom could effectively design a fun game for a surrogate population. Despite the positive results, the reliability of the evaluation methods is questioned. Inconsistencies were noted within the individual evaluation tools and the comparative results for some constructs yielded a low reliability score. We conclude that further research is required to establish suitable evaluation methods for evaluating fun with children in developing countries.Gavin Sim (grsim@uclan.ac.uk) is a computer scientist with an interest in human-computer interaction, usability, user experience, and child-computer interaction; he is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing Engineering and Physical Sciences of the University of Central Lancashire. Janet C. Read (jcread@uclan.ac.uk) is a computer scientist with an interest in child-computer interaction, handwriting recognition, and interaction design; she is a Professor in the School of Computing Engineering and Physical Sciences of the University of Central Lancashire. Peggy Gregory (ajgregory@uclan.ac.uk) is a computer scientist with an interest in agile methodologies, health informatics, and child-computer interaction; she is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing Engineering and Physical Sciences of the University of Central Lancashire. Diana Xu (YFXu@uclan.ac.uk) is a researcher with an interest in child-computer interaction, tangible computing, and serious games; she is a Research Assistant in the School of Computing Engineering and Physical Sciences of the University of Central Lancashire.Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline. com/hhci. 264Sim et al.

Using the MemoLine to capture changes in user experience over time with children

“…In contrast, all the children received the training at the same time within the school, and were assisted by the teacher and researchers if they encountered any difficulties. Even with a difference in individual guidance during training the children were able to follow instructions and complete the activities, as has been evidenced before from participatory design sessions involving groups of children [51,52]. Therefore the MemoLine could be completed either individually on a one-to-one basis or as part of a larger group.…”

Capturing and Considering Idea Development in School Pupils’ Design Activities

“…Over time there have been many papers that have explored children's participation in design. Many of these have described methods, methodologies and tools [5,7,24,25,26], a good number reflect on the inclusion of children from marginalized or non-typical groups [4,5,9,14,17]. There is a small set of papers that have begun to explore how ideas come from children during design [11,18].…”

Designing for Financial Literacy: Co-design with Children in Rural Sri Lanka

“…This understanding enables them to interpret the designs unambiguously. A study [48] reports that children from technology savvy environment can design for children who are technologically challenged. This was done with 50 children from a UK primary school where they designed a game related to hand washing for children in Uganda.…”