Satisfaction and Learnability in Edutainment: A usability study of the knowledge game 'Laser Challenge' at the Nobel e-museum

This paper is a report on the initial findings of a study conducted in the project FunTain with the main purpose to find general guidelines for edutainment games, in order to guide designers of such games. Usability evaluations, with users and experts, were conducted on the edutainment game in order to find usability problems. These findings were then analyzed and used as input in focus group meetings, held with joint teams consisting of game designers and HCI experts. The result was a proposal of a list of design guidelines. In this paper they are grouped in three general categories; (1) game experience, (2) balance between entertainment and education, and (3) general understanding. Findings indicate that users had problems in understanding the underlying model for the game as well as finding the knowledge related content. Experts, further, gave comments about feedback problems and different types of inconsistencies. Some of the implications from the findings, as discussed in the focus group, were guidelines for earning and loosing points, scoring and performance feedback and game object characteristics.