Paper Info
Title
MecWilly in your pocket: On evaluating a mobile serious game for kids
Abstract
This paper presents a mobile serious game, which exploits the Socio-Cognitive Conflict (SCC) by means of a game with the aim of supporting preschool and primary school children in understanding two important concepts: (i) topographical orientation, and (ii) recycling. In fact, an important competency that children deal with is the topographical orientation, particularly as regards the relativity of the objects positions with respect to a specific point. To reach this goal we have designed and developed a serious game for mobile devices (e.g. tablets), where kids need to move a character in a grid, with the aim of helping it in associating specific garbage to the right recycling container (taking into account the relative position of the character and of all the objects in the grid). Such a character represents a humanoid robot named MecWilly. We have conducted a first assessment of our serious game by involving six preschool and primary school kids. The first result we have obtained show that kids were very interested in playing such a game and in experiencing more game levels. Further experimentations have been already planned and will be conducted in three primary schools, stressing the SCC by contrasting the mobile serious game with a similar version of the game played by interacting with humanoid robots.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1109/ISCC.2016.7543737
2016 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communication (ISCC)
Keywords
Field
DocType
serious game,evaluation,Socio-Cognitive Conflict,recycling,topographical orientation,mobile game
Competence (human resources),Game mechanics,Computer science,Game design,Game design document,Exploit,Mobile device,Multimedia,Mobile telephony,Humanoid robot
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-5090-0680-9
0
0.34
References 
Authors
15
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Catia Prandi115534.78
Silvia Mirri223243.66
Paola Salomoni338955.88
Elvis Mazzoni4395.63