Abstract:
In the era of speedy growth of scientific study and technology where there has been an extended development of computer games, the scope of this thesis is discussing the research on a learning through games and it will establish whether a computer game is helpful and has any advantage on learning as divergent to other traditional teaching methods involve the learner with greater interest depend upon game’s content and its usability. Content and usability are two main and important aspect of any digital game and its success or failure totally dependent upon these two factors. This study highlighted and identified this gap in existing research that what is the effect of content and impact of usability of such digital games on children learning. In this study, content and usability of digital games is analysed with the objectives to assess the impact of content and usability in digital educational games. The main objectives in this study are: to identify usability issues and its negative effect on younger learner and to evaluate the content of such educational games in order to identify contents quality and its effectiveness on children’s learning. This study also proposed guidelines for handling usability and content problems that is identified after conducting the experiment of such education games with children. In order to conduct this study, a thorough literature was reviewed in which usability heuristics was identified that were used either for general game evaluation or such educational games evaluation. This study found that there is no specific usability heuristic exist that perform evaluation of such educational game’s content and their usability. Hence, we selected a common usability heuristic in order to perform and test usability evaluation along with study objectives. To achieve study objectives educational games are classified on the basis of their genre and different games are selected of same content for experiment. For testing and evaluation of usability whether its effect learning of children, total 4 experiments were_ conducted, in each experiment children participated aged between 3 and 5 years. After experiment, study found that usability and content quality can put positive impact on learning subject to if content has highest quality and good usability heuristic and guidelines incorporated during designing such digital educational games. This study also proposed guidelines for evaluation of usability and content of such digital educational games.
