Project Description

Children from “grupa mare” of the Romanian kindergarten (age 5-6) need an application to evaluate
their knowledge and develop their skills. The process is very complex, as it comprises a deep
understanding of the current capabilities of children, as well as the materials they need to learn.
Migrating the learning process in a digital application is a great solution for adapting to the modern
conditions.

Since most of the children nowadays are interested in games, an application that enables them to
learn or exercise some of the fundamental skills they have to acquire can be implemented, in a way
that is both useful and fun. Assessments will be designed to measure and develop a series of skills
and abilities, including cognitive, linguistic, mathematical, social, and emotional aspects.

Moreover, the applications should allow teachers to see each child’s progress and marks (the mark
will consist in a fun reward, such as coins, stars and so on).

Requirements Summary

The application should contain all 3 domains presented by the teacher, all of them being studied
during the course of this year. The activities implied by the application should combine and integrate
as many as possible from the following: Science, Language and Communication, and People in
Society. The science domain refers to knowledge about nature and mathematical activities, the
linguistic domain contains themes such as sentence making, plural vs singular, story making based on
pictures, riddles and so on. The last domain brings awareness of the importance of protecting the
nature, the animals, but also of human values such as friendship, gratefulness etc.

The evaluation needs to be as engaging as possible. The complex goals that we want to achieve
should be packed in an interactive, colourful, and engaging application, to maintain children’s
interest and promote learning, and to support and enhance their natural curiosity and desire to
learn. Another important aspect is that most children don’t know how to read yet, so the task
description will be made by auditory or visual means. The evaluation verifies basic knowledge that
they acquired through play during a certain period of time, and the evaluation itself would be
treated as a game.

In order to make sure that our system will provide successful data we will introduce some principles
such as: visibility of system status (audio and video messages so that the children will know when
something good or wrong is happening), a match between the system and the real word (characters
and games that are current and interesting for them), user control and error prevention (in most
cases, children press buttons a lot by mistake; a better solution is to restrict functions to some parts
of the application so that the user won’t be tempted to do other things than those intended),
minimalist design (keeping the content and visual design focused on the essentials), help (demos or
hints when solving tasks or playing games).

Another aspect is that children need a way of receiving rewards else they become easily bored and
also need to be encouraged when they make a mistake, so they would not become frustrated.

Regarding the teachers, they should be able to see each child’s progress and results as fast and
intuitive as possible.

Design Space

The requirements that may be difficult to realize is to establish the way in which the points will be
given – we should choose a proper scale of evaluation (for example – point from 1 to 5, 1 to 10, 100
to 1000 etc) and we should be very careful about how to give the points (we should not be too harsh
if a child does not solve the game from the first try, but at the same time we should differentiate
between children that solve from the first try and the one that had to try again).

The requirement of creating a minimalist design for keeping the content and visual design focused on
the essentials might not be easy to realize if we want to be the application to be very colourful and
interesting.

The main trade-off refers to the fact that only some themed exercises will be chosen from the given
list, because the game should be only about 12 minutes (due to the short attention span of the
children). Moreover, when choosing a main theme for the entire application some children might
find it more interesting while others might have preferred another one.

We think that the easiest tasks to support are creating the mathematical and social mini games (on
the other hand, the Communication games are harder to create because they are harder to be
evaluated by the computer). It would also be hard to make a system that would allow the teachers to
see the results for a longer period of time – the results are easier to display while the child is actually
playing the game and they usually disappear after the game is finished. We think that it is also easy
to make the descriptions of the tasks by audio and visual means.

Design Summary

The designs should integrate the minigames in a whole. We have discussed various ways to do so.
The first one is creating a story and integrating the activities in the story. The second one involves
structuring the games on multiple levels of difficulty, while the third one offers the user the
possibility of choosing the order of playing the activities. We had also an idea to separate totally the
activities (math, language and society) but we discarded it because this would make the children
think about the evaluation and not fully enjoy the game itself.

The designs

1. Story

This design involves a story. The story will have multiple steps. In each step, there will be a
character(boy or girl, chosen by the player), will meet with certain characters(animals, animated
characters, etc), and will have a discussion with them. After that, they will have to do an activity, and
then they will meet another character and so on. At the end, the children will reach the story’s end,
and the points that they have earned will be shown.

Scenario: Child chooses the female character->child meets Snow White->child talks with Snow White
about the importance of protecting the nature and animals->child plays a game in which they should
choose how to protect a flower->child receives a score/child should be able to play again/child
should be able to receive a hint->child meets another character….again exercises about what they
talked with the character->reach the end of the story, where the children will receive a score.

Advantages:-interesting perspective

-easy to follow

-not confusing

-many characters that are familiar to the children

Disadvantages:-the order of the exercises is predetermined

-you need to follow the story in order to get to an exercise

-the children may get bored and not reach the end

Almost all requirements can be met by this design.

The potential users have liked the design, appreciating the story aspect. They also suggested to add
Elsa as a character, because girls love her. We have asked some of our cousins and Andrada’s mother,
who is a teacher.

2. Menu

This design involves presenting a menu, designed as a tree with leaves that represent activities, from
which they will be able to choose. When they will have completed all of them, the final points will be
showed to them. After they completed one exercise, the leaf button will be disabled(turn to gold).

Scenario: Child choose the leaf with numbers on them-> exercise with numbers will be shown-> child
receives a score/child should be able to play again/child should be able to receive a hint->the child
will go back to the tree to choose another leaf, after the previous one will be disabled-> ,….->receive
the reward at the end

Advantages: -the order of exercises can be chosen

-pretty design

-the number of exercises knows the number of exercises beforehand, so they will know when the
game will end

Disadvantages: -there is no story involved, only exercise

-not very engaging

-they may start with a harder exercise and get discouraged

The potential users have liked the design, appreciating the fact that they can choose the order of
exercises. We have asked some of our cousins and Andrada’s mother, who is a teacher.

3. Levels

This design involves going through a series of levels, like a boardgame. The levels will be ordered by
difficulty. After each level, the children will receive a score. At the end, the children will meet with a
special character (Mickey Mouse).

Scenario: the child starts the game, and starts the first level-> first exercise will be shown-> child
receives a score/child should be able to play again/child should be able to receive a hint->…->reach
the end, and meet Mickey Mouse, and receive the reward.

Advantages: -the number of levels is known

-the levels are ordered by difficulty

-the surprise at the end

Disadvantages: -there is not much interactivity

-the design may seem bland

-there is no story
The potential users have liked the design, appreciating the boardgame design and the meeting with
the character at the end. We have asked some of our cousins and Andrada’s mother, who is a
teacher.

Requirements changes

We gave up on the usability principle regarding the minimalist design. The designs are well organized
and structured, but they include several decorative elements that are not minimalist, but make the
game more interesting and engaging. We also think that given the created designs it would be quite
hard to provide demos to children, so we will only use hints as help. A usability criteria that we
established was “the children to be able to complete any game without any questions” – maybe this
is not so achievable for all children (especially if they are not familiar with technology) so they might
address questions to the teacher.