Search results

The purpose of this paper is to provide information about the design principles of educational games in the context of an educational math game example to educational game developers and instructors. Especially, it tries to demonstrate the importance of the academic content-fantasy integration and entertainment factors of educational games from the viewpoint of the experts. For this purpose, as a sample, an educational math game was examined to see how successful is the academic aspect, fantasy aspect, academic-fantasy aspects integration and enjoyment aspect of the game. Good aspects of the game and aspects need improvement were summarized for guidance to game developers while producing educational games.

In this study, heuristic evaluation method was used for evaluating the educational math game. In the scope of this study, an example of modern educational computer game was examined by experts in this study. The integration of academic-fantasy context and enjoyment aspects of the game were analyzed deeply by using qualitative and quantitative data collection methods together.

According to Relevance Embedding Translation Adaptation Immersion and Naturalization rubric results, embedding element received the highest mean score. It showed that the academic content is well coupled with the fantasy/story content. According to GameFlow criteria, clear goals and feedback sections got the highest scores; on the contrary immersion section got the lowest score. Immersion element of the game should be improved. According to the interview findings, more than half of the participants stated that, in terms of academic content of game, players can actively be involved in learning process during the game. The story of the game and elements used in the game have counterpart in daily life. Didactic elements do not affect learners’ flow in the game. It is easy to learn and feedbacks are enough and useful.

This study offered suggestions to designers for developing good educational games which are well balanced with academic and fantasy context.

The purpose of this paper is to statistically explore the relationship between web usability and web presence of the universities. As a case study, five Turkish universities in different rankings which were selected from Webometrics rankings were evaluated and compared.

Two different methods were employed for performing usability evaluation of the selected universities: a user testing was used to measure the user performance on the selected tasks and a questionnaire to assess the user satisfaction on the website use. Both usability evaluation methods were applied on the pre-determined tasks for each university by participation of 20 subjects. After the usability evaluation, the universities were ranked in terms of usability results and finally, the relationship between web usability and web presence of universities was statistically investigated by using Kendall’s rank correlation.

Several common usability problems which were asserted by related previous studies were identified at the end of usability evaluation of university websites. The usability results also revealed that selected Turkish university websites suffer from numerous usability problems. Further, a strong positive correlation (p < 0.05) between the usability of the university websites and their web presences were identified. Hence, the participants showed a higher success and satisfaction while performing the tasks on the university websites which have strong web presences.

The findings from this study have practical implications for universities. Correlation results showed that universities can improve their web usability by giving importance to their web presence volumes. Universities can estimate their web usability levels by investigating their web presence rankings and they can also raise their rankings in Webometrics ranking system by improving the usability of their websites. Moreover, university web developers can design more usable and more user-friendly websites by avoiding usability and design problems identified through usability evaluation.

Different from the prior research efforts focussing on usability of educational web pages, this study contributes to the growing literature by statistically exploring the relationship between web presence and web usability of universities. This study is also precious from the point of view that it is one of the first attempts to evaluate and compare usability levels of a set of universities’ websites from Turkey.