Measuring Usability of Phonic Mobile Applications based on User Success Rate for Pre-School Children

Recent studies showed that mobile devices have the potential to support children's learning and have increased the interest of parents and educators. However, it is important that mobile applications for children are well-designed and usable to ensure the applications are effective for children learning. This study aims to look at the usability of mobile applications designed for pre-school children especially children with speech delay. We have conducted an experiment with 10 pre-school children with speech delay and eleven of ABC and phonics mobile applications were selected based on the prior studied guidelines. During the usability testing, children's behaviour and facial expression while playing mobile applications were observed and recorded. The collected data was measured using usability measurement by analysing user's success rate. Based on the result and analysis, children have showed positive expression towards the well-designed with good usability mobile application

Speech Therapy Mobile Application for Speech and Language Impairment Children

Speech and language impairment (SLI) is a communication disorder when a person has difficulties to produce speech sounds correctly and understand others. Children with SLI need speech therapy to help them improve their communication skills in order to communicate effectively with others. Due to the lack of speech therapist in the state, children are mainly waste valuable learning time while waiting for therapy and these speech therapy sessions are usually done only on a one-to-one basis within a block period. Recent studies showed that mobile technologies may work as an educational tool which can help children to learn. Hence, a local prototype of mobile speech therapy application was developed to be appealing for pre-school children of age 3 to 6 with SLI and will be used as a supplementary activity which can be used during a speech therapy session or at home. In this paper, we present the results of a six months intervention experiment with SLI children. We have adapted the heuristic evaluation for evaluating the usability of the local prototype mobile speech therapy application. The results of our study shows those children and their parents gave positive responses towards the mobile application, also helps in improving the children skills in producing correct sounds

Game Usability Heuristics Evaluation Approach for Speech Therapy Mobile Application Games

In this paper, we present an approach used to evaluate speech therapy mobile application games using a usability heuristics evaluation method for speech delay children. Designing a mobile application specifically for children with speech delay is always a challenge. A well-designed user interface and game flow are vital in a therapy game to promote self-learning and therapy by exploration in the game. There have been many proposed and used usability evaluation methods, however, heuristics evaluation strategy was used in our study as this method was specifically designed and developed to evaluate mobile application games. There are three components in the heuristics models which are Game Usability, Mobility, and Gameplay. In our experiment, we were evaluating a local prototype of speech therapy mobile application using the game usability component because we focus more on the user interface designs. The target group of this study was pre-school children aged 3 to 6 years old with speech delay. Questionnaires were developed based on the game usability heuristics and distributed to their parents or caregivers. Interviews were also conducted to obtain their comments and feedbacks. The study results showed that the game usability heuristics are useful in identifying potential issues and problems in user interface designs of the prototype. In addition, the results also revealed that the heuristics strategy is useful in producing a set of effective design guidelines for mobile application games

CreativeCulture : Learning Through Play

The CreativeCulture project has successfully implemented participatory studies that have effectively infused the CreativeCulture model to assist and accelerate learning for children especially in remote and rural locations in Sarawak. The CreativeCulture model is built upon playful and gameful design (based on the GameChangers initiatives). The localised and indigenous programme has been deployed in the rural schools in Borneo Malaysia (see http://mycapsule.my). A number of developed tools, innovative space; creative and educational products were built and aligned with the inclusion of Arts in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics education (STEAM) and computational thinking. These products are published under the Creative Commons Licence

Assessing Fun and Engagement in Mobile Applications for Children with Speech Delay

This paper presents the fun and engagement elements, and the assessment methods of these two elements for children. Fun to children is something they do that is amusing or enjoyable. Engagement refers to how a child shares a positive connection to peers or activities. Both of these elements could be an important factor to support and strengthen learning among children. We employed the Again-again table and the Adaptive Behaviour Scale [24] from Bayley-III to measure and to assess fun and engagement, particularly in educational mobile apps for children with speech delay. A local prototype of speech therapy mobile application was used in the experiment, and the results have shown that both fun and engagement are correlated