Alessandra Melonio

Towards tangible gamified co-design at school: two studies in primary schools

Co-design is an ideal approach to design with users. It allows designers to create products, such as games, with their intended users and in their natural environment, e.g., children and their teachers in their school. Nowadays school contexts, however, pose their own requirements to co-design, which can affect its success. For instance, school contexts tend to be associated to boring rote by learners, who are used to interactive digital games. Gamification can then help in creating a positive engaging experience for school classes that co-design, as games do. This paper takes up such a view: it gamifies co-design contexts in order to positively engage school classes. To this end it presents two studies with gamified co-design in primary schools: heterogeneous teams co-designed prototypes by resolving missions as in a game, in the first short-term study; they did it in an even more gamified context, in the second long-term study. Results of both studies are encouraging for the approach. The paper also advances basic guidelines for tangibly gamifying co-design at school, grounded in the studies and literature.

Gamified co-design with cooperative learning

Co-design is an ideal approach to design with mixed teams that include learners and teachers. However, in modern learning contexts, learning and engagement are both key goals, and that poses several challenges to co-design. This paper investigates such challenges after outlining co-design and situating it in current user experience design trends. Then the paper uses the challenges to derive requirements for co-design, and shows how to meet requirements, fostering engagement as well as learning, by blending co-design with gamification and cooperative learning. It ends by showcasing a study that uses the blended co-design approach, and by outlining how this led to novel challenges and work.

Children's emotions and quality of products in participatory game design

The paper presents an empirical study centred on a participatory game design activity with 810 years old primary-school children, split in different sessions. The study assesses how children perform in game design and whether they are engaged in design tasks. To this end, the study gathers data concerning the quality of childrens game design products, regarded as indicators of childrens performance in game design. It collects data concerning childrens emotions, which are taken as indicators of their engagement in game design. The paper statistically analyses and discusses how emotions and quality of products evolve across the game design experience, and how emotions are related to childrens quality of products. Results of this work can help researchers, educators and practitioners manage a complex design experience with and for children, and identify key emotions for promoting quality of design work. The paper discusses childrens performance and engagement in participatory game design.It presents a participatory game design study with 810 year olds.The study assesses childrens emotions, for engagement, and product- quality, for performance.The study analyses their correlations, and interpret results with observation data.The paper concludes with implications of the study for participatory game design.

Emotions and Inclusion in Co-design at School: Let’s Measure Them!

Co-design with children comes with methods and techniques for creating technological products with children, such as video-game prototypes. When co-design takes place in schools, learners’ involvement and enjoyment of co-design become crucial concerns for researchers. But how to measure emotions, more in general, and involvement in a co-design study with children? This paper presents a co-design study, run with a novel co-design method at school, for involving children in co-design groups and emotionally engaging them in producing game prototypes. It explains how emotional engagement and inclusion can be and were operationalized and measured in the co-design study, thereby providing feedback to co-design researchers interested in measuring the same constructs.

The User Classes Building Process in a TEL Project

Nowadays, circa 10% of 7-11 olds turn out to be poor comprehenders: they demonstrate text comprehension difficulties, related to inference making, despite proficiency in low-level cognitive skills like word reading. To improve the reading comprehension of these children, TERENCE, a technology enhanced learning project, aims at stimulating inference-making about stories. In order to design and develop the TERENCE system, we use a user centred design approach that requires an in depth study of the system’s main end-users, namely, its learners and educators. This paper reports the user classes building process for learners by means of user-centred design field studies.

Gamified probes for cooperative learning: a case study

This paper advances the idea of tangible gamified probes for cooperative learning processes, which require synchronous in-presence and in-situ interactions. The paper focuses on gamified probes for promoting a sense of progression and control, as well as social relations in a cooperative learning process in classroom. It reports a case study in a primary school. The study employed gamified probes as early-design solutions: each probe had limited ad-hoc functionalities, tested in the field, and was flexible enough to enable different usages so as to inspire designers. Probes were also endowed with embedded micro-electronic components for enhancing their interaction with children and human-to-human interaction, besides for storing relevant interaction data. After reporting the study results, the paper discusses them, and it concludes reflecting on the design of future gamified probes for enhancing cooperative learning in classroom.

Engaging “New Users” into Design Activities: The TERENCE Experience with Children

The diffusion of digital technology is bringing new types of users “into the market”, like children, elderly people, or technology illiterate people. Designers and researchers have to face new design challenges having at disposal a lighter and less structured body of knowledge about characteristics and demands of these users, and even consolidated design methods may prove to be inefficient. With respect to these issues, and more specifically with focus on data gathering techniques, in this paper we discuss the experience of the TERENCE project, aimed at developing a technology enhanced learning system for improving text comprehension in children 7–11 years old. In particular, our experience suggests extending the repertoire of inquiry techniques with methods shaped and informed by gamefulness phenomena.

There Is No Rose Without A Thorn: An Assessment of a Game Design Experience for Children

Game design is recently conducted at school for eliciting childrens design ideas about games for them. However, game design is a complex interaction design task, requiring rather mature cognitive skills. This paper reflects on it, reporting a gamified game design experience with groups of children in primary schools.

The Learners' User Classes in the TERENCE Adaptive Learning System

Nowadays, circa 10% of 7-11 olds turn out to be poor comprehenders: they demonstrate text comprehension difficulties, related to inference making, despite proficiency in low-level cognitive skills like word reading. To improve the reading comprehension of these children, TERENCE, a technology enhanced learning project, aims at stimulating inference-making about stories. In order to design and develop the TERENCE system, we use a user centred design approach that requires an in depth study of the systems main end-users, namely, its learners and educators. This paper reports on the specification of the user classes for the TERENCE learners by means of user-centred design field studies, the resulting global system architecture, and an example use case of the system, with few related GUIs snapshots.

How to Design Games for Deaf Children: Evidence-Based Guidelines

The goal of this paper is to present the first evidence-based guidelines for the design of electronic games for deaf children. According to the most recent deaf literature, playing with such games shows positive effects on deaf children’s visual abilities and working memory abilities. Our review of deaf literature, briefly sketched in the paper, considers such abilities as well as other relevant findings concerning the needs of deaf children most relevant for the design of electronic games for them. The paper also outlines the latest findings of the TERENCE project, which builds electronic smart games for deaf children. All such findings are then use to compile the guidelines, which are presented in the third and final part of this paper.