Evaluation of Popularity of Multi-lingual Educational Web Games – Do All Children Speak English?

Playing computer games is widely popular among children and teenagers as an entertainment activity; however, computer games can also be easily transformed into tools for education. City University London’s City eHealth Research Centre (CeRC) has developed such educational web games as a part of a European Project, e-Bug (www.e-bug.eu) to improve pupils understanding of the importance of hand and respiratory hygiene and responsible antibiotic use. This paper studies the usage of the Games between January 2009 and March 2010, specifically for 10 European Union countries. The Games were first provided in English-only and it was found that over half of the users were from non-UK countries. Once the Games were translated into multiple European languages, it was found that users preferred to play the Games in their native tongue. Thus, English was not a hindrance to Game playing/access; however, the option of using another language was always taken once provided. Users found the website through search engines and direct links from schools and other websites, and over 60,000 visitors played the Games at least once. The quantitative data used to investigate our research questions stemmed from the Games website server logs

If you Build it would they Play It? Challenges and Solutions in Adopting Games for Children

This article discusses the challenges encountered with the adoption of games for children created as part of the ebug/edugames4all project. One of the aims of this project is/was to design health games for 9 to 15 year old children. This paper presents one of the challenges we encountered with games adoption: how to teach children that were not familiar with the Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) game mechanics how to play the games. We solved this issue by using a training mission teaching children the basic concepts, navigation, and methods for “investigation” required to understand before playing the game. This paper presents the evaluation of the training missions and the lessons drawn

Gaming to master the game - Game usability and game mechanics

Health intervention aimed at children using serious games are starting to grow on popularity, however, Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) paradigm for serious games is in its infancy. In this article, we present a series of IDS educational games developed with the aim of promoting responsible antibiotic use and hygiene part of the edugames4all project. Despite commercial success and market popularity of IDS games one of the major challenges we encountered when the games were distributed to schools for evaluation was that many children never played a similar game before and found the concept challenging. As a result, some of the children enjoyed the game while others were frustrated and gave up at a certain point. Although the phenomenon is not new, and it present even in commercial games, we proposed a new approach to ensure that all children understand the message delivered and at the same time, they enjoy playing the game. This paper proposes the introduction of a training mission that teaches children in a game like environment the basic concepts necessary to progress through the game. The training mission was evaluated in experimental settings with two groups of children, one playing the training mission before playing the game and another one who did not. The results showed that there is no statistically significant difference in terms of usability between the two groups, however the group that did not play the training mission found the game more “awkward” to play, and the difference between the groups in this case was statistically significant