# Exploring Children's Requirements for Game-Based Learning Environments

Authors: Tuula Nousiainen; Marja Kankaanranta
Journal: Advances in Human-Computer Interaction
 (2008)

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## Abstract

End users' expertise in the development of new applications is acknowledged in user-centered and participatory design. Similarly, children's experience of what they find enjoyable and how they learn is a valuable source of inspiration for the design of products intended for them. In this paper, we explore experiences obtained from collaboration with elementary school children in the design of learning environments, based on three projects and three requirements gathering techniques. We also discuss how the children experienced the participation. The children's contribution yielded useful, both expected and unanticipated, outcomes in regard to the user interface and contents of the learning environments under development. Moreover, we present issues related to design collaboration with children, especially in terms of the children's feeling of ownership over the final outcome.


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## Body

## 1. Introduction

The potential of involving children
as active contributors in technology design is being increasingly acknowledged
(e.g., [1–3]). Children are no longer seen only as research objects or as a
passive target group for the development of new technologies. Instead,
similarly as the end users' knowledge about, for example, their work practices
is valued in participatory design with adults (e.g., [4]), also children's
expertise about the issues they are familiar with is considered valuable.
Several researchers (e.g., [5, 6]) have emphasized the need to better understand
children's needs as technology users as their ways of interacting with
technology often differ fundamentally from those of adults, for example, in
terms of curiosity and tendency to explore, and their preference of working
together. Moreover, children's wishes especially regarding the fun and
motivating aspects may be difficult for adult designers to envision [3, 6]. A
recently emerged perspective to designing applications for children is
child-computer interaction (CCI), which applies HCI principles and
participatory methods to this specific context (e.g., [6]). Moreover, the design
of educational software has broadened the HCI perspective to bring in
principles of pedagogical design: an approach referred to as learner-centered
design (LCD) has been introduced as a way of bringing together HCI on the one
hand and educational and developmental principles on the other [7, 8].
Additionally, it is worth looking into areas such as child-centered pedagogy
and sociology for a multidisciplinary perspective on children's active
citizenship and empowerment (e.g., [9, 10]).Traditional
user-centered design has been criticized for placing the users in the role of
mere reactors to suggested solutions, not initiators of ideas (e.g., [11, 12]).
In other words, the users' contribution is minimal—or left out
altogether—in all other
design phases except for the testing and evaluation of solutions in different
iterations. To respond to this concern, researchers have developed and applied
various requirements gathering techniques aiming to allow the users to initiate
ideas early in the design process. As an alternative for traditional
interviewing in the gathering of early requirements, for example, several
studies have employed techniques specifically tailored to children. These
include, for example, photo diaries [13], Kid Reporter in which children create
“newspaper articles” related to the themes of the application [14], and “Mission
from Mars” entailing an innovative interview technique and enhanced with photo
collage creation [15, 16]. Moreover, more specific ideas for the functions and
the appearance of the application being developed have been explored through
different creative techniques based on drawings [3, 17], storyboarding [18, 19],
and collaborative low-tech prototype creation [1, 20, 21].Gathering ideas
from children early in the design process has yielded useful insights into what
children want in technology in general or in a specific type of application.
Druin et al. [21], for example, discovered that children want especially
control, variety, social interaction, and creative tools, and that they pay
attention to the appearance, learnability, and “coolness” of an application, as
well as to how rich it is in terms of the use of multimedia. Children's early
involvement in requirements gathering has revealed clues also about, for
example, gender differences in preferences related to technology, children's
navigation skills, ways of presenting textual information, application-specific
content-related preferences, the variety of elements to be included in user
interfaces and their structures, and children's desire to personalize their
applications [14, 15, 17–19].The aims of the
study presented in this paper were twofold. Firstly, the goal was to develop
game-based learning environments that would respond to children's requirements,
and secondly, the goal was to analyze the development process from the
perspectives of both the developers and the children. This paper focuses on examining
the significance of children's participation for the collaborative technology
design process and for the attributes of the products. A specific feature was to
carry out the design project in authentic school environments, which required
the development of collaborative school-based methods for child-centered
design. We address issues yielded by three idea gathering practices that were
used in the projects, namely, user interface drawings, idea map creation, and
the evaluation of existing learning environments.


## 2. Research Process

The principal research approach in
our study was development research. It is employed in studies of educational
interventions, addressing either the intervention itself, the process of
developing it, or both [22, 23]. Using the principles of development research
and case study research [24], we have studied the development processes of
three game-based learning environments or websites for children. The three
applications discussed in this paper are Talarius, Virtual Peatland, and Kids'
Site (Child Ombudsman's website for children).Talarius is a software tool with which
children can create and play educational computer board games. Working in pairs
or small groups, the children gather material relevant to the topic of their
game (factual texts, images, sounds, videos). Based on this material, they
create questions, design a game board, and play games created by their
classmates. This paper deals with the development of the pilot version of the application,
which took place in the academic year 2003-2004. A school class (23 children,
ages 11-12) participated in the project from the requirements collection to the
evaluation of the final outcome.Virtual Peatland is a web-based learning
environment about peatlands. It includes text-based information sections as
well as interactive and game-like parts (Peatland Adventure game and various
quizzes). In the years 2005 and 2006, an elementary school class (approximately
25 children at a time, ages 11-12) participated in the process through various
workshop sessions, each of which dealt with a specific aspect related to the
structure of the learning environment or presentation forms to be used in it.Kids' Site is a part of the Finnish
Child Ombudsman's website, aiming to make children aware of the UN Convention
on the Rights of the Child, to enable them to have a say in issues concerning
them, and to share stories about their everyday lives. A group of 7–9-year-old
children from an after-school care facility took part in the project at
different stages in the years 2006 and 2007. The group size varied from four to
eight children between sessions. Additionally, a brief paper questionnaire
about ideas related to the website was answered by 25 children.In each case, the
data consisted of development documents, outcomes of the design processes,
interviews and questionnaires to the developers and the child participants, and
observation of the design process documented in research journals. Experiences
related to the development process were gathered both from the perspective of
the children and that of the developers. The data was analyzed using a
framework consisting of several research questions as a basis of analysis. In
terms of this paper, from the children's point of view, the research questions
were principally related to whether they felt that their ideas had had an
effect on the final outcome, how they perceived their own expertise in the
project, and how they experienced the participation activities in general. From
the developers' perspective, it was examined how they felt the children's
participation and ideas aided their work and affected their development
solutions. Additionally, design session outcomes were compared to the final
products in order to examine how the ideas provided by the children manifested
in the final applications.


## 3. What Children Want in Game-Based Learning Environments

Several different idea gathering
techniques and practices were used in the course of the projects. In this paper,
we address three of them, namely, user interface (UI) drawings, idea maps, and
evaluations of existing learning environments, presenting issues discovered
through these activities and how they guided the development of the
applications. They represent different approaches to idea generation: the
drawings start from scratch and leave plenty of room for imagination, the idea
maps entail collaborative and gradual development of ideas, and the evaluation
of learning environments provides a collection of different existing solutions
to draw upon. Additional ideas and feedback were obtained through prototype
evaluation and field trials, but in this paper we focus on ideas obtained
before the development of prototypes of any kind.


### 3.1. Ideas from UI Drawings

At the beginning of the Talarius
project, the children expressed their ideas about the appearance and
functionality of the application by drawing UI sketches during their art class.
They could choose whether they wanted to draw the game-playing mode or the game
editor. Each child created an individual drawing. The rationale for having
children make drawings is a wish to allow them to design something new instead
of just reacting to existing suggestions [17]. Drawing UI concepts suits the art
class context well but there are certain challenges related to their use.
Firstly, there is a risk that the children pay a great deal of attention to
details while overlooking the bigger picture, that is, what the objects in
their drawings do and how they behave [3]. Secondly, despite the assumption
that expression by drawing is easy and natural for children, they might have
problems, for example, with understanding the idea of drawing things that would
be seen on the screen [19]. Some problems did surface in the Talarius project
as well. Despite recognizing the gradual development of the Talarius prototype,
the children had a hard time picturing a link between this change and their
individual ideas. The developers, however, considered the UI drawings to be of
great value for their work. They made use of the drawings by analyzing their
main attributes and by placing them all on display on the walls of their office
in order to be able to continually draw upon them for guidance in design
decisions. In problematic situations related to, for example, the choice of
colors or layout, it was easy to turn to the drawings for clues and
inspiration.The developers
discovered that the UI elements included in the drawings and their locations
reflected the children's familiarity with common Windows software. This
suggested that the developers could adhere to familiar conventions in order to
enhance the learnability and usability of the application, yet without making
it too much of a tool and too little of a game. The importance of quick
learning is highlighted especially in children's software, as they are often
prone to lose their interest unless they get in control of the software rapidly
(e.g., [21]). Another navigation-related issue evident in the pictures was that
many tasks were performed using buttons (instead of menus), which suggested
that the children wanted all the most essential options to be visible on the
screen at all times in order to find them quickly. Figure 1 entails “Quit,”
“Continue,” “Question,” and “Information” buttons in the top right hand corner,
and buttons for choosing the game piece in the bottom right hand corner.Figure 1
An example of the user interface drawings.In the drawings depicting the
playing mode, it was observed that it was very important for the children to
see quickly what the status of the game and standings of the players were at a
given time. The children had very different ways of representing the standings
in their pictures but the common element was that this information was clearly
visible and multiple formats of presenting the status were often used. In
Figure1, the status of the player is represented in terms of three different
indicators: energy, points, and lives. In the game editor mode, the children's
desire for as much freedom of choice as possible became apparent, which is in
line with observations made by Druin et al. [21] about children wanting a large
variety of functions and something to explore. According to the drawings, the
children wanted the software to enable them, for example, to create backgrounds
and characters, to choose freely the game path and the shape and color of the
squares on it, to adjust the level of difficulty, and to add animations to the
game.


### 3.2. Issues Discovered with Idea Maps

As brought up above, the children
did not see the link between their individual drawings and the final outcome
very well, which decreased their sense of ownership of the ideas. Guha et al. [2]
have tackled this problem with a special technique for gradually merging ideas
to make the process visible. In the Virtual Peatland project we took a somewhat
related approach, attempting to make the different workshop sessions—as well as the
activities within a session—build on each
other more concretely. The workshops were, for a large part, based on gradual
idea map creation.The collaboration
started with a session in which the children and the researchers created idea
maps together to chart initial ideas about the content and structure of the
site. In this paper, we leave the topic-specific content issues aside and only
discuss children's opinions about more general questions, such as the
presentation forms to be used in the learning environment. The children first
made individual lists of their ideas and, based on them, suggested things to be
included in a collective list of ideas. After this, the children suggested
which issues on the list they considered the most important, and these were
used as the basis for an idea map. Out of the individual lists and the
collective list, the children highlighted games, pictures, quizzes, animations,
and “learning by seeing and hearing” as the most important presentation forms,
and these were taken into further discussion with the aid of the idea map.
Similarly as the children in the Talarius project, they emphasized especially
the importance of being able to create and explore—for example, to
make a peatland, which became one of the two main tasks in the Peatland
Adventure game—and having a
variety of different activities to choose among. Later, in another session, the
idea map was taken onto a more detailed and concrete level: the children worked
in groups to select specific peatland species they considered the most
interesting or important and to pick the most appealing presentation forms
among those suggested previously. Another form of idea maps used in this
project was a “game idea map” created by a group of children who were
especially interested in game-related things. The main observations about their
game idea were that their game had a boardgame-like structure and that they
wanted various different kinds of subtasks, again a confirmation of the
importance of variety and a large selection of things to do.The suggestions
obtained from these activities guided us to include a “from children to
children” section in the learning environment, in addition to the Peatland
Adventure game, to provide the users with varying activities. The children's
section contains quizzes, crossword puzzles, and other types of tasks created
by the participant children, video clips filmed during a peatland excursion
with the children, and a Talarius-based board game about peatlands. In
addition, through these content creation activities, we aimed to provide the
children with a possibility to contribute concretely to the outcome and thereby
promote their feeling of having an influence in the development of the website.
The creation of contents did play an important role in terms of the children's
feeling of ownership. Through these very concrete creations and their being
straightforwardly present in the final outcome, the children saw more clearly
that their participation had yielded something that furthered the development
of the application. When comparing the children's experiences from the Talarius
and Virtual Peatland projects, the latter succeeded with conveying the feeling of
ownership better. When the children were asked whether they felt that their
ideas showed in the final outcome, there were more negative than affirmative
answers in the Talarius project, while in the Virtual Peatland project it was
vice versa. Similarly when asked whether they considered that they had power in
the development of the application, the difference between the two projects was
noticeable. This was mainly due to the content creation activities which were
in a considerably greater role in the Virtual Peatland project. The children
felt empowered especially in terms of the quizzes they made. Moreover, in an
interview conducted after the Virtual Peatland project, the content creation
activities were also the best remembered aspects of the whole process.


### 3.3. Obtaining Ideas from Existing Learning Environments

Critiquing existing applications
has proved a successful technique in design projects [19–21]. Having
children point out pros and cons about different applications has helped the
designers understand children's ways of interacting with technologies, uncover
problems, and start developing solutions based on observations about children's
preferences [19]. We asked the children to evaluate existing websites both in
the Virtual Peatland project and in the Kids' Site project. Some of the
websites were thematically related to the topics of the projects, whereas
others were chosen merely because they included a variety of different
activities and ways of presenting information. The children gave feedback on
the websites, telling which features they did or did not like, and what kinds
of ideas the websites gave them as regards the learning environment under
development.Consistently
with observations made in previous research (e.g., [15, 21]) and confirming issues
discovered with the other techniques in our projects, the children preferred
sites which had a large variety of different activities or even a possibility
to create something themselves, and it was very important to them what the site
looked like. One interesting layout-related observation revealed through this
technique in both projects was that having much empty space on a page was a
negative thing in the children's opinion. Instead, the children's wish for a
great variety of content existed also on single-page level. As the UI drawings
also suggested, the desire to have plenty of visible elements concerned
navigation as well: the children did not want to move back and forth much, they
preferred having as direct access to all the parts of the site as possible.In
regards to the contents of the learning environment, the children wanted
excitement and things that were related to real life. Their hope for real-life
feel extended also to the visual appearance of the learning environment; the
children liked illustrations that used real photographs. Additionally, as
regards the illustrations, the children wanted to explore pictures with a great
deal of detail, which is consistent with their preference for a variety and a
great amount of content in general. The children also liked the idea of one
main character that illustrates a learning environment—a game character
or alternatively an animated “mascot” that appears on different pages
throughout the website.The
children's opinions led us to introduce an animated cat character on Kids' Site
to represent different sections of the site and to present the Rights of the
Child. Moreover, the children created various different types of quizzes and
puzzles for Virtual Peatland (as mentioned above) and Kids' Site to cater for
the desire to have a great variety of activities. The real-life context is also
represented in different ways in each of the sites: Virtual Peatland contains
photographs taken and videos filmed by children, and Kids' Site has stories
written by children about their everyday lives and how the Rights of the Child
manifest in their lives. Children's possibility for creative participation is
guaranteed especially on Kids' Site through several interactive activities
involving their contribution to the website content.


## 3.1. Ideas from UI Drawings

At the beginning of the Talarius
project, the children expressed their ideas about the appearance and
functionality of the application by drawing UI sketches during their art class.
They could choose whether they wanted to draw the game-playing mode or the game
editor. Each child created an individual drawing. The rationale for having
children make drawings is a wish to allow them to design something new instead
of just reacting to existing suggestions [17]. Drawing UI concepts suits the art
class context well but there are certain challenges related to their use.
Firstly, there is a risk that the children pay a great deal of attention to
details while overlooking the bigger picture, that is, what the objects in
their drawings do and how they behave [3]. Secondly, despite the assumption
that expression by drawing is easy and natural for children, they might have
problems, for example, with understanding the idea of drawing things that would
be seen on the screen [19]. Some problems did surface in the Talarius project
as well. Despite recognizing the gradual development of the Talarius prototype,
the children had a hard time picturing a link between this change and their
individual ideas. The developers, however, considered the UI drawings to be of
great value for their work. They made use of the drawings by analyzing their
main attributes and by placing them all on display on the walls of their office
in order to be able to continually draw upon them for guidance in design
decisions. In problematic situations related to, for example, the choice of
colors or layout, it was easy to turn to the drawings for clues and
inspiration.The developers
discovered that the UI elements included in the drawings and their locations
reflected the children's familiarity with common Windows software. This
suggested that the developers could adhere to familiar conventions in order to
enhance the learnability and usability of the application, yet without making
it too much of a tool and too little of a game. The importance of quick
learning is highlighted especially in children's software, as they are often
prone to lose their interest unless they get in control of the software rapidly
(e.g., [21]). Another navigation-related issue evident in the pictures was that
many tasks were performed using buttons (instead of menus), which suggested
that the children wanted all the most essential options to be visible on the
screen at all times in order to find them quickly. Figure 1 entails “Quit,”
“Continue,” “Question,” and “Information” buttons in the top right hand corner,
and buttons for choosing the game piece in the bottom right hand corner.Figure 1
An example of the user interface drawings.In the drawings depicting the
playing mode, it was observed that it was very important for the children to
see quickly what the status of the game and standings of the players were at a
given time. The children had very different ways of representing the standings
in their pictures but the common element was that this information was clearly
visible and multiple formats of presenting the status were often used. In
Figure1, the status of the player is represented in terms of three different
indicators: energy, points, and lives. In the game editor mode, the children's
desire for as much freedom of choice as possible became apparent, which is in
line with observations made by Druin et al. [21] about children wanting a large
variety of functions and something to explore. According to the drawings, the
children wanted the software to enable them, for example, to create backgrounds
and characters, to choose freely the game path and the shape and color of the
squares on it, to adjust the level of difficulty, and to add animations to the
game.


## 3.2. Issues Discovered with Idea Maps

As brought up above, the children
did not see the link between their individual drawings and the final outcome
very well, which decreased their sense of ownership of the ideas. Guha et al. [2]
have tackled this problem with a special technique for gradually merging ideas
to make the process visible. In the Virtual Peatland project we took a somewhat
related approach, attempting to make the different workshop sessions—as well as the
activities within a session—build on each
other more concretely. The workshops were, for a large part, based on gradual
idea map creation.The collaboration
started with a session in which the children and the researchers created idea
maps together to chart initial ideas about the content and structure of the
site. In this paper, we leave the topic-specific content issues aside and only
discuss children's opinions about more general questions, such as the
presentation forms to be used in the learning environment. The children first
made individual lists of their ideas and, based on them, suggested things to be
included in a collective list of ideas. After this, the children suggested
which issues on the list they considered the most important, and these were
used as the basis for an idea map. Out of the individual lists and the
collective list, the children highlighted games, pictures, quizzes, animations,
and “learning by seeing and hearing” as the most important presentation forms,
and these were taken into further discussion with the aid of the idea map.
Similarly as the children in the Talarius project, they emphasized especially
the importance of being able to create and explore—for example, to
make a peatland, which became one of the two main tasks in the Peatland
Adventure game—and having a
variety of different activities to choose among. Later, in another session, the
idea map was taken onto a more detailed and concrete level: the children worked
in groups to select specific peatland species they considered the most
interesting or important and to pick the most appealing presentation forms
among those suggested previously. Another form of idea maps used in this
project was a “game idea map” created by a group of children who were
especially interested in game-related things. The main observations about their
game idea were that their game had a boardgame-like structure and that they
wanted various different kinds of subtasks, again a confirmation of the
importance of variety and a large selection of things to do.The suggestions
obtained from these activities guided us to include a “from children to
children” section in the learning environment, in addition to the Peatland
Adventure game, to provide the users with varying activities. The children's
section contains quizzes, crossword puzzles, and other types of tasks created
by the participant children, video clips filmed during a peatland excursion
with the children, and a Talarius-based board game about peatlands. In
addition, through these content creation activities, we aimed to provide the
children with a possibility to contribute concretely to the outcome and thereby
promote their feeling of having an influence in the development of the website.
The creation of contents did play an important role in terms of the children's
feeling of ownership. Through these very concrete creations and their being
straightforwardly present in the final outcome, the children saw more clearly
that their participation had yielded something that furthered the development
of the application. When comparing the children's experiences from the Talarius
and Virtual Peatland projects, the latter succeeded with conveying the feeling of
ownership better. When the children were asked whether they felt that their
ideas showed in the final outcome, there were more negative than affirmative
answers in the Talarius project, while in the Virtual Peatland project it was
vice versa. Similarly when asked whether they considered that they had power in
the development of the application, the difference between the two projects was
noticeable. This was mainly due to the content creation activities which were
in a considerably greater role in the Virtual Peatland project. The children
felt empowered especially in terms of the quizzes they made. Moreover, in an
interview conducted after the Virtual Peatland project, the content creation
activities were also the best remembered aspects of the whole process.


## 3.3. Obtaining Ideas from Existing Learning Environments

Critiquing existing applications
has proved a successful technique in design projects [19–21]. Having
children point out pros and cons about different applications has helped the
designers understand children's ways of interacting with technologies, uncover
problems, and start developing solutions based on observations about children's
preferences [19]. We asked the children to evaluate existing websites both in
the Virtual Peatland project and in the Kids' Site project. Some of the
websites were thematically related to the topics of the projects, whereas
others were chosen merely because they included a variety of different
activities and ways of presenting information. The children gave feedback on
the websites, telling which features they did or did not like, and what kinds
of ideas the websites gave them as regards the learning environment under
development.Consistently
with observations made in previous research (e.g., [15, 21]) and confirming issues
discovered with the other techniques in our projects, the children preferred
sites which had a large variety of different activities or even a possibility
to create something themselves, and it was very important to them what the site
looked like. One interesting layout-related observation revealed through this
technique in both projects was that having much empty space on a page was a
negative thing in the children's opinion. Instead, the children's wish for a
great variety of content existed also on single-page level. As the UI drawings
also suggested, the desire to have plenty of visible elements concerned
navigation as well: the children did not want to move back and forth much, they
preferred having as direct access to all the parts of the site as possible.In
regards to the contents of the learning environment, the children wanted
excitement and things that were related to real life. Their hope for real-life
feel extended also to the visual appearance of the learning environment; the
children liked illustrations that used real photographs. Additionally, as
regards the illustrations, the children wanted to explore pictures with a great
deal of detail, which is consistent with their preference for a variety and a
great amount of content in general. The children also liked the idea of one
main character that illustrates a learning environment—a game character
or alternatively an animated “mascot” that appears on different pages
throughout the website.The
children's opinions led us to introduce an animated cat character on Kids' Site
to represent different sections of the site and to present the Rights of the
Child. Moreover, the children created various different types of quizzes and
puzzles for Virtual Peatland (as mentioned above) and Kids' Site to cater for
the desire to have a great variety of activities. The real-life context is also
represented in different ways in each of the sites: Virtual Peatland contains
photographs taken and videos filmed by children, and Kids' Site has stories
written by children about their everyday lives and how the Rights of the Child
manifest in their lives. Children's possibility for creative participation is
guaranteed especially on Kids' Site through several interactive activities
involving their contribution to the website content.


## 4. Conclusions and Discussion

The significance of children's
participation is divided into the issues related to carrying out collaborative
design and research processes with children and those related to the outcomes
of the design projects, namely, attributes of children's learning environments.
In this section, we will discuss these lessons separately.


### 4.1. Lessons Learned for Conducting Collaborative Projects with Children

One of the aims was to study the
development processes and the activities they entailed from the perspective of
the children and the developers alike. As we have seen above, involving
children in the design process revealed and confirmed to the developers several
issues that were useful to know when developing a game-based learning
environment or a children's website. From the developers' point of view, the
children's contribution was important in many aspects. According to the
developers, children's ideas can guide the design of the appearance,
functionality, and usability of the application. They especially stated that
the children's participation helped them make the software more motivating for
children. They also felt that the children's participation is valuable in
enhancing the developers' understanding of children as technology users in
general.For the children
themselves, participation in a real design project provided a chance to learn
new things such as teamwork skills, shared decision-making, planning and
designing, content-area and technology related knowledge, and activities which
varied from their everyday schoolwork. Four areas of learning were identified
in the analysis: (1) content
area issues, (2) design skills ranging from general ones, such as more
methodical ways of carrying out tasks, to more specific ones, such as different
planning and design techniques, (3) social skills needed for collaboration in
different compositions from pairs and small groups to speaking up before a
larger group, and (4) learning skills, such as searching and evaluating
information. In previous research, Druin [25] has also discovered learning
outcomes in the same vein.However, when
working with school classes, supporting individual children's experience of
contribution was a challenge. In the course of the study, we aimed to respond
to this problem in two ways, firstly by improving the collaborative workshops
through making them build on one another better, and secondly by incorporating
concrete content-creation activities in the process. The content-creation
perspective proved to be an important factor in enhancing the children's
feeling of ownership: the project in which they were in a larger role was seen
as more successful in terms of conveying this feeling, and the content creation
activities were considered as the most enjoyable activities.In summary, a good
collaborative design process consists of varying activities in order to,
firstly, provide the developers with rich data to draw upon in their
implementation solutions and, secondly, maintain the children's interest in the
participation process. Ideally, the activities build on each other, forming a
logical and clear continuum which enables the children to follow the
development of the application and the manifestation of their ideas. Moreover,
the inclusion of concrete content creation activities enhances the children's
feeling of ownership of the final outcome.


### 4.2. Lessons Learned for the Development of Children's Learning Environments

From the point of view of the
development solutions, the issues discovered can be categorized into user
interface and content related points. The UI issues comprise those having to do
with navigation and those dealing with the appearance of the application, and
the content-related issues concern the themes and the functionality of the
applications. Table1 summarizes these observations. We will discuss a few of
these points in more detail.Table 1
Issues discovered in the projects.
CategoryIssueSourceUI/NavigationUsing familiar UI conventions
without risking game-likenessUI drawingsControls clearly visible at all
timesUI drawingsExisting sitesGame status and standings clearly
visible at all timesUI drawingsUI/AppearanceContent-rich layouts, little empty
spaceExisting sitesRealistic appearance, for example,
photographsExisting sitesContent/ThemeThemes related to real lifeExisting sitesGreat variety in themesExisting sitesIdea mapsContent/FunctionalityMuch freedom of choice in
functionality to allow explorationUI drawingsIdea mapsExisting sitesPossibility to create somethingIdea mapsA main character (a game character
or a guiding “mascot”)Existing sitesAs children want social interaction
in technology [15, 21], being able to easily compare scores and standings is
important to them in order to be able to monitor how they and others are doing.
As regards the appearance, the children wanted each page or screen to be rich
with content; not so abundant pages appeared to be boring to the children and
to imply lack of content in the application altogether. Content-wise, our
observations suggest similar issues as previous studies have brought up: the
children want a great deal of content and functions to explore, and to create
something new—or at least tweak
and modify some aspects about the application [15, 21]. The children's preference
for layouts using real photographs over those based on drawings might reflect
their wish to avoid too “childish” appearances. The same might be true at the
content level; themes dealing with real-life events and topics acknowledge
children as part of the society, recognizing their interest in the world around
them. On the other hand, the idea of a drawn (and perhaps animated) character
as a guide on a website or as an avatar in a game is very appealing to them,
most likely due to adding a more personal feel to the website or the game.To summarize,
children's desire for quick command of the application they are using manifests
in several ways, such as by wanting to have UI elements (be they function
buttons, navigation links, or content elements) constantly visible and readily
available, and by calling for clear presentation of the status and standings in
games. Content-wise, the most essential issue is versatility and richness of
content; the children want creative activities, freedom of choice, and a large
variety of things to explore and discover—both on the level
of the whole application and, interestingly, also in terms of the structures of
single pages or views.


## 4.1. Lessons Learned for Conducting Collaborative Projects with Children

One of the aims was to study the
development processes and the activities they entailed from the perspective of
the children and the developers alike. As we have seen above, involving
children in the design process revealed and confirmed to the developers several
issues that were useful to know when developing a game-based learning
environment or a children's website. From the developers' point of view, the
children's contribution was important in many aspects. According to the
developers, children's ideas can guide the design of the appearance,
functionality, and usability of the application. They especially stated that
the children's participation helped them make the software more motivating for
children. They also felt that the children's participation is valuable in
enhancing the developers' understanding of children as technology users in
general.For the children
themselves, participation in a real design project provided a chance to learn
new things such as teamwork skills, shared decision-making, planning and
designing, content-area and technology related knowledge, and activities which
varied from their everyday schoolwork. Four areas of learning were identified
in the analysis: (1) content
area issues, (2) design skills ranging from general ones, such as more
methodical ways of carrying out tasks, to more specific ones, such as different
planning and design techniques, (3) social skills needed for collaboration in
different compositions from pairs and small groups to speaking up before a
larger group, and (4) learning skills, such as searching and evaluating
information. In previous research, Druin [25] has also discovered learning
outcomes in the same vein.However, when
working with school classes, supporting individual children's experience of
contribution was a challenge. In the course of the study, we aimed to respond
to this problem in two ways, firstly by improving the collaborative workshops
through making them build on one another better, and secondly by incorporating
concrete content-creation activities in the process. The content-creation
perspective proved to be an important factor in enhancing the children's
feeling of ownership: the project in which they were in a larger role was seen
as more successful in terms of conveying this feeling, and the content creation
activities were considered as the most enjoyable activities.In summary, a good
collaborative design process consists of varying activities in order to,
firstly, provide the developers with rich data to draw upon in their
implementation solutions and, secondly, maintain the children's interest in the
participation process. Ideally, the activities build on each other, forming a
logical and clear continuum which enables the children to follow the
development of the application and the manifestation of their ideas. Moreover,
the inclusion of concrete content creation activities enhances the children's
feeling of ownership of the final outcome.


## 4.2. Lessons Learned for the Development of Children's Learning Environments

From the point of view of the
development solutions, the issues discovered can be categorized into user
interface and content related points. The UI issues comprise those having to do
with navigation and those dealing with the appearance of the application, and
the content-related issues concern the themes and the functionality of the
applications. Table1 summarizes these observations. We will discuss a few of
these points in more detail.Table 1
Issues discovered in the projects.
CategoryIssueSourceUI/NavigationUsing familiar UI conventions
without risking game-likenessUI drawingsControls clearly visible at all
timesUI drawingsExisting sitesGame status and standings clearly
visible at all timesUI drawingsUI/AppearanceContent-rich layouts, little empty
spaceExisting sitesRealistic appearance, for example,
photographsExisting sitesContent/ThemeThemes related to real lifeExisting sitesGreat variety in themesExisting sitesIdea mapsContent/FunctionalityMuch freedom of choice in
functionality to allow explorationUI drawingsIdea mapsExisting sitesPossibility to create somethingIdea mapsA main character (a game character
or a guiding “mascot”)Existing sitesAs children want social interaction
in technology [15, 21], being able to easily compare scores and standings is
important to them in order to be able to monitor how they and others are doing.
As regards the appearance, the children wanted each page or screen to be rich
with content; not so abundant pages appeared to be boring to the children and
to imply lack of content in the application altogether. Content-wise, our
observations suggest similar issues as previous studies have brought up: the
children want a great deal of content and functions to explore, and to create
something new—or at least tweak
and modify some aspects about the application [15, 21]. The children's preference
for layouts using real photographs over those based on drawings might reflect
their wish to avoid too “childish” appearances. The same might be true at the
content level; themes dealing with real-life events and topics acknowledge
children as part of the society, recognizing their interest in the world around
them. On the other hand, the idea of a drawn (and perhaps animated) character
as a guide on a website or as an avatar in a game is very appealing to them,
most likely due to adding a more personal feel to the website or the game.To summarize,
children's desire for quick command of the application they are using manifests
in several ways, such as by wanting to have UI elements (be they function
buttons, navigation links, or content elements) constantly visible and readily
available, and by calling for clear presentation of the status and standings in
games. Content-wise, the most essential issue is versatility and richness of
content; the children want creative activities, freedom of choice, and a large
variety of things to explore and discover—both on the level
of the whole application and, interestingly, also in terms of the structures of
single pages or views.



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*Source: 284056-2008-08-24.xml*