Design and Evaluation of a Mobile Application for an Educational Card Game

Rubens Anderson De Sousa Silva,Joseane De Oliveira Vale Paiva,João Bosco Borges Aragão Filho,Ismayle De Sousa Santos,Rossana Maria De Castro Andrade,Bruno Sabóia Aragão

doi:10.5753/jis.2020.763

Rubens Anderson De Sousa Silva, Joseane De Oliveira Vale Paiva + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.5753/jis.2020.763

Copy DOI

Abstract

Educational games can provide players with rich learning and socializing experiences through different interac-tion paradigms, such as board games, card games, and, more recently, hybrid (physical-digital) games. However, the process of making, maintaining, and evolving an educational analog game is not a trivial task. Balancing the game mechanics and dynamics to provide a pleasant and educational gaming experience can be very difficult to achieve. Furthermore, adding a digital component in the gameplay can disturb the experience of the game and learning ob-jectives, and this kind of insertion should be evaluated. This work then aims to report the process of developing and evaluating a mobile application for helping the gameplay of a card game that focuses on on teaching software testing concepts. Our primary concern during the development of the application was whether its insertion would compromise the learning process or the social experience of the card game. The developed application has the fol-lowing functionalities: point counter, dice scrolling, timer, and a summary of the rules. We designed and developed a first version of the application. Then, we evaluated the impact of its insertion on gameplay by applying the game assisted with the application with students from Computer Science and Computer Engineering courses and, after the end of the game, the participants answered questionnaires about the players’ experience and their impressions about the application. Based on the results, we perceived that the use of the application provided benefits to the players’ experience, although the evaluation highlighted some opportunities for improvement. Thus, we evolve the mobile application based on the comments gathered in this evaluation. This new version has improvements on user’s interface, aiming to provide a better user experience, and new functionalities. Furthermore, we assessed the second version and compared both versions of the mobile app in order to collect evidence regarding improvements in the game experience.

Highlights

In traditional teaching methods, the focus is on the teacher as responsible for concentrating and organizing the content and passing it to the student, who memorizes and solves activities (Brighenti et al, 2015). Souza and Dourado (2015) argue that this teaching method is less effective for education in the 21st century, because, in the students’ perception, the ideal is that he/she is responsible for solving problems and becoming more actively involved with the content exposed in the classroom.In this sense, the use of educational games can be of great value to aid teaching and improve the learning process
The development process of GreaTest Helper included a (i) phase elicitation, specification, and analysis of requirements, based on the standard described in Sommerville (2010), in which we studied elements commonly used in applications developed to support analog games and how they were adapted, and adopted a product scope based on the demands proposed by the players themselves; (ii) a phase of design, where we choose the framework for development and decisions related to the change in the interfaces were made; (iii) a prototyping phase, where sub-versions of the app were developed and validated by the project members
As the GreaTest Card Game deals with the teaching of Software Testing and the students of the first semester had not yet seen subjects that substantially addressed this topic, we developed an introductory software testing material and explained to the students

Summary

Introduction

Souza and Dourado (2015) argue that this teaching method is less effective for education in the 21st century, because, in the students’ perception, the ideal is that he/she is responsible for solving problems and becoming more actively involved with the content exposed in the classroom. In this sense, the use of educational games can be of great value to aid teaching and improve the learning process. As explain de Freitas (2006), ”the key challenge for effective learning with games is for the learner to be engaged, motivated, supported and interested and importantly for the learning to be undertaken in relation to clear learning outcomes as well as being made relevant to real world contexts of practice.”

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion