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Valenza,M. V., Gasparini, I., & Hounsell, M. da S. (2019). Serious Game Design for Children: A Set of Guidelines and their

Validation. Educational Technology & Society, 22 (3), 19–31.

19 ISSN 1436-4522 (online) and 1176-3647 (print). This article of the Journal of Educational Technology & Society is available under Creative Commons CC-BY-ND- NC 3.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). For further queries, please contact Journal Editors at ets-editors@ifets.info.

Serious Game Design for Children: A Set of Guidelines and their Validation

Matheus V. Valenza, Isabela Gasparini and Marcelo da S. Hounsell*

LARVA – Laboratory for Research on Visual Applications, DCC – Computer Science Department, UDESC – State

University of Santa Catarina, Brazil // matheusvvalenza@gmail.com // isabela.gasparini@udesc.br //

marcelo.hounsell@udesc.br

*Corresponding author

ABSTRACT: Digital games can be used as allies to support and motivate the learning process. Many researchers

focus their studies on the so-called Serious Games (SG), which are games whose primary objective is not solely

entertainment. What happens, however, is that these games end up being far from children ́s expectations, especially

when compared to entertainment-only games. Thus, this work reviewed the literature in search for positive

experiences of developing and using SG for children. Afterward, they were compiled together as a set of guidelines

that can be followed by designers and developers of SG for children, guiding the design decisions so that the final

product would be better suitable to children. The set of guidelines was obtained through SG analysis of child- oriented and child technology recommendations, leading to a total of forty guidelines that are divided into four

groups: input, output/interface, content, and control. They have been assessed by 59 experts which concluded that

they were all worth attention when designing SG for children.

Keywords: Serious game, Game design, Children, Guidelines

1. Introduction

Some of the benefits brought by the use of games on education, besides the improvement of learning, are the

motivating effect (Hsiao, 2007) and the development of cognitive abilities to solve problems, creativity and critical

thinking (Balasubramanian, Wilson, & Cios, 2006). These advantages can even benefit students with concentration

problems (Cone et al., 2006). In addition, skills such as learning by discovery (Kirriemuir & Mcfarlane, 2004), motor

and spatial coordination (Gros, 2007) and expert behavior (VanDeventer & White, 2002) are also developed while

the player has fun. Games are the best way to lead the child to activity, self-expression, knowledge, and socialization

(Falkembach, 2006). These benefits become even more accessible when the target audience is composed of children,

since they are already familiar with technology and are Digital Natives (Prensky, 2001).

However, there is an obstacle to all educational Serious Games (SG): they are still little used because achieving a

balance between quality and fun has been shown to be a difficult task (Savi & Ulbricht, 2008). Also, there are few

studies that deal with the adequacy of SG design for children and those who did, reported only a few useful

characteristics of the design (as will be shown by the related works).

The objective of this paper is to present a set of guidelines to help design SG for children and the validation process

used to assess their relevance by experts. To do this, the work gives a theoretical foundation and related work before

presenting the set of guidelines and then the validation process and discussions about it are presented.

2. Theoretical foundation

A Serious Game (SG) is a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment (Salen & Zimmerman,

2004). In a formal definition, it is a mental contest, played with a computer according to specific rules, which uses

entertainment for the purpose of government or business training, education health, public policy, and strategic

communication objectives (Zyda, 2005).

Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) is an area of scientific investigation that is concerned with the phenomena

surrounding the interaction between children and computational and communication technologies (Read &

Markopoulos, 2013). CCI encompass the study of the design, evaluation, and implementation of interactive computer

systems for children, and the wider impact of technology on children and society (Hourcade, 2008). CCI addresses

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the study of children’s activities, behaviors, concerns, and abilities, as they interact with computer technology (Read

& Bekker, 2011).

Guidelines are high-level statements ranging from a wide variety of cases to low-level declarations limited to

specific contexts (Mariage, Vanderdonckt, & Pribeanu, 2005). Guidelines are recommendations to designers and

developers when there are no specific standards. Guidelines are designed to certain processes according to what the

best practices are. These are then practical questions that are intended to guide the decisions of the product

development process. Guidelines serve as a way to achieve design principles, which are, in practical terms, tips on

how a system should be at its final stage, reminders of aspects to be contemplated or how it should be developed

(Herrington, Herrington, & Mantei, 2009). Guidelines also relate to design heuristics, with the difference that

heuristics are essentially observed in practice (Nielsen, 2002).

The compilation of guidelines assists less experienced designers by showing a path to be followed, preventing them

from pitfalls during the design (Leavitt & Shneiderman, 2006). Furthermore, the use of guidelines helps designers to

reflect on their practices, evaluating whether they should be applied and/or refined to the work context. The goal of

the guidelines is assisting researchers and designers who find themselves in similar contexts and problems

(Herrington, Herrington, & Mantei, 2009).

3. Related work

According to Chiasson and Gutwin (2005), recommendation sets organized in an objective way to aid in the design

of systems to children are scarce, often making designers adopt the same principles for traditional interfaces that are

focused on adults.

Chiasson and Gutwin (2005) presents a catalog of design principles for technologies aimed at children’s needs,

abilities and expectations. The goal of this catalog is helping the designers in finding these design recommendations

in an organized way and in one place. The catalog is organized into three categories: (i) cognitive, composed of

literacy, feedback, mental development, and imagination; (ii) physical, which refer to motor skills and tangibility,

and; (iii) social/emotional, which relate to engagement, social interactions, and collaboration.

The work of Nousiainen and Kankaanranta (2008) explored the experiences gained in three learning environment

projects that involved the collaboration of elementary school children. The work discusses the expectations that this

target audience has in relation to the interface of a software and its content. These expectations were categorized into

four sets: (i) interface; (ii) appearance; (iii) theme, and; (iv) content.

Chorianopoulos et al. (2014) present three design principles for SG in Mathematics, which are: (i) involving the

player with a hero story; (ii) employing familiar games mechanics and; (iii) provide constructive trial-and-error

feedback to promote learning. In order to illustrate the application of these three principles, the authors developed a

SG for teaching addition and subtraction with a focus on children of 13 and 14 years of age.

The work developed by (Falcão & Barbosa, 2015) aimed at presenting formative and objective analysis of relevant

pedagogical aspects in the process of children’s interaction with a game involving logic programming. According to

the authors, these parameters present the potential to compose a method of evaluating games of this target group. The

authors’ perception, however, was that educational systems have their own characteristics, so that general heuristics

do not always apply. In this way, based on the assumption that heuristics are considered an effective method of

evaluating interfaces, the formative evaluation was analyzed in order to surpass Nielsen ́s heuristics (Nielsen, 2002)

to the context of educational software. The heuristics were approached from three groups: exploratory interaction;

visual metaphors of the interface, and; interaction design.

These related works described only partial and limited initiatives to assist SG design for children and clearly show

the need for a bigger and unified set of guidelines because some findings are complementary and others overlap. The

set of guidelines we composed contains 40 guidelines and were divided into four categories, as will be explained

next.

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4. Methodology and guidelines proposal

The process to gather the guidelines was based on the aspects observed in the design, development, and evaluation of

SG for children and their contribution to the CCI area. We conducted a literature search in November 2017 where

(“Serious Games” AND “Children”) and (“Game” AND “Guidelines” AND “Children”) were used in Scholar

Google and Academia.edu search engines. These engines are well-known for being large databases of open access

scientific material. From the 15 papers initially found, we analyzed in each paper their set of guidelines, their related

works and, their references. Subsequently, authors and works most commonly cited were also investigated, resulting

in a final set of 29 sources, as it appears in Table 1.

Table 1. List of Guidelines, Their Group, Age Range and Source(s)

Group Guideline Age range Source(s)

Input

Guidelines

G1: Simplify the use of the

mouse

4 – 7;

6 – 8;

9 – 13

Bruckman & Bandlow (2003); Stewart et al.

(1998); Chiasson & Gutwin (2005); Druin et al.

(2001); Hourcade (2008)

G2: Avoid differentiating

between left and right

2 – 5 Bruckman & Bandlow (2003); Strommen (1998)

G3: Use efficient interaction

mechanisms with interface

elements

4 – 5;

4 – 7;

5 – 10;

Chiasson & Gutwin (2005), Druin et al. (2001);

Tse et al. (2011); Hourcade (2008); Steiner &

Moher (1992)

G4: Allow spoken instructions 6 – 10 Vasconcelos et al. (2017); Lopes (2015)

G5: Hide features of advanced

levels

Not

informed

Bruckman & Bandlow (2003); Halgren,

Fernandes, & Thomas (1995)

G6: Explore cooperative use 4 – 11 Inkpen (1997)

Output/

Interface

Guidelines

G7: Easy-to-read font type usage 6 – 10 Bruckman & Bandlow (2003); Bernard et al.

(2001); Vasconcelos et al. (2017); Nousiainen &

Kankaanranta (2008)

G8: Relate interface metaphor to

children world

4 – 7;

6 – 9;

5 – 10

Bruckman & Bandlow (2003); Jones (1993);

Halgren, Fernandes & Thomas (1995);

Schneider (1996); Falcão & Barbosa (2015);

Chiasson & Gutwin (2005); Druin et al. (2001);

Nousiainen & Kankaanranta (2008)

G9: Make interaction elements

ease to spot

3 – 12 Bruckman & Bandlow (2003); Gilitz (2002);

Carvalho, Gasparini, & Hounsell (2015)

D10: Use appropriate interaction

time to children’s age

Not

informed

Tse et al. (2011); Carvalho, Gasparini, & Hounsell

(2015)

G11: Use meaningful icon as a

replacement or help to texts

4 – 7 Chiasson & Gutwin (2005); Tse et al. (2011);

Hanna et al. (1998)

G12: Prefer recognizing than

remembering

2 – 6;

6 – 9

Falcão & Barbosa (2015); Nasiri,

Shirmohammadi, & Rashed (2017)

G13: Use of visual interface

mainly

6 – 10 Chiasson & Gutwin (2005); Druin et al. (2001);

Carvalho, Gasparini, & Hounsell (2015);

Vasconcelos et al. (2017)

G14: Provide accurate and fast

feedback

4 – 7; 6 –

9; 9 – 14

Falcão & Barbosa (2015); Chiasson & Gutwin

(2005); Steiner & Moher (1992); Said (2004)

G15: Show clearly the status of

the system

7 – 12;

11 – 12

Chiasson & Gutwin (2005); Hanna et al. (1998);

Nousiainen & Kankaanranta (2008)

G16: Prefer to use characters for

interaction

12 – 14 Chiasson & Gutwin (2005); Hanna et al. (1998);

Lester et al. (1997)

G17: Present information to

users according to their level of

development

Not

informed

Hourcade (2008)

G18: Use interfaces and

conventions that are known by

the users

6 – 8;

11 – 12

Nousiainen & Kankaanranta (2008); Rosas et al.

(2003)

G19: Layout must be rich in 7 – 12 Nousiainen & Kankaanranta (2008)