Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
During the session, the appointed experimenter was observing and intervening
only at critical points, when the learner definitely needed assistance. Qualitative
data were thus gathered:
•
via direct observations, e.g., of facial expressions, and by tracking comments per
tasks;
•
via indirect questions to children at critical points, e.g., if the child asks for help,
if the child looks lost, if the child looks frustrated.
In the North of Italy, technical facilities, like a stable wireless, allowed for collecting
reliable quantitative data through logs. The quantitative data we gathered were:
•
session time, that is, the time span in between the start and the end of a session;
•
for the reading task, the start and end time for reading the topic selected, and the
reading time per page;
•
for each game instance, the number of correctly resolved game instances, and the
time for their resolution before the game was over.
At the end each session, the experimenters run a debriefing phase and a short in-
terview with indirect questions, reported in [5]. The questions were related to the
usability and the experience of the learner with the system, i.e., their previous ac-
quaintance with tablets and PCs, as well as whether they thought the story text or
illustrations were appropriate for younger/older children, whether they thought the
games and the interaction gestures implemented are appropriate for younger/older
children, whether the avatar are nice for younger/older children, and what they
would like to improve in the GUI.
2.4
Experiment Results
All the usability issues tracked, during the session or the debriefing phase, are re-
ported in details in [5] in a specific category, per country, and should be considered
for improving the design of the learner GUI. In general, a category corresponds to a
task, e.g., playing with a smart game. Two categories do not correspond to specific
tasks, namely, the avatar and the navigation category. Therein, we gathered issues
re-occurring in different tasks, and then removed the issues from these tasks. An ex-
ample is the position of the avatar during the browsing of topics and stories, as well
as during the reading and playing activities: positioning the avatar in the top-right
corner of the screen hides the avatar, and its role in the learner GUI is too passive
or unclear. The category named “playing with smart games” is subdivided into sub-
categories of correlated tasks or issues, e.g., choices available to the learner, so as to
facilitate the interventions of those working on the design and requirements. Table 2
briefly reports the usability results divided in positive and negative issues, where
•
negative (NEG) issues if they pinpoint specific usability problems,
•
and positive (POS) issues if they support design choices or purport a positive user
experience.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search