Inspired by the work of Kiwrious, many children do not engage in science activities at home. After school, when they have the time and freedom to choose what to play, 'science' is not typically an activity that would be considered.
Meanwhile, prior research has shown that sensors are a successful tool in engaging children to learn science. Through this, children can explore their own surroundings, encouraging them to naturally engage with their curious minds. With increased access to smart devices, we investigated using built-in sensors to enable hands-on learning of science concepts at home.
We developed a game from conceptualization to real-world deployment for children between 8-12 years. The game, called ‘Hopu’, encourages children to explore basic science concepts through measuring environmental phenomena through their own devices. In doing so, they can discover and hatch new imaginary creatures from the world of Hopu.
Photos of the current application
The process of designing Hopu involved an iterative process that required user interviews, designing, user testing, feedback, development - over and over… and not necessarily always in that order! Rather than describing a step-by-step process, below are details of some key moments through developing Hopu.
We sought to understand how children spend their time after school and in the weekends, as well as their parents’ involvement in occupying this time. We interviewed 10 parents and 16 children (between 8-14 years).
Methods: Semi-structured interviews, secondary research, affinity mapping / thematic analysis
A screenshot of our affinity mapping
These interviews led us towards a game-based learning approach.
1 Norman G Lederman, Judith S Lederman, and Allison Antink. 2013. Nature of science and scientific inquiry as contexts for the learning of scienceand achievement of scientific literacy. International Journal of Education in Mathematics, Science and Technology 1, 3 (2013).
We built a quick proof of concept to test sensor functionality, which would form the core of our application. Using this, we built an early prototype with a basic tutorial to guide users through the game and performed some early user testing with five children.
Methods: Wireframing, low-fidelity prototyping, usability testing
From proof of concept to the first version of Hopu that we tested with children
Given feedback from the children, we re-defined our MVP and updated core features to make it feel more like a game - for example, including a story narrative, characters, and updating visual assets. We completed user observations with four children during this process.
Methods: User flows, high-fidelity prototyping, UI design, usability observations
New user flow based on prior user testing, which led to our high-fidelity prototype
We recruited another 11 children (between 8-12 years old) for a user study and evaluation. These children had never used nor seen the app before. This study was conducted under ethical approval from the National University of Singapore and took place over 5 days. We interviewed each child, observed them completing the tutorial, then gave them access to play at home in their own time for a few days. We concluded by conducting a follow-up interview at the end. Throughout the study, we employed an intrinsic motivation inventory (IMI) survey twice to quantitatively evaluate any changes in intrinsic motivation and attitudes towards science pre- and post-study.
Mixed methods: User observations, semi-structured interviews, intrinsic motivation inventory (IMI) survey, in-game interactions and analytic tracking.
Children's responses from our user study and evaluation, including photos
Through interviews, observations, and voluntary in-game feedback, we received many positive responses from children. They said it was “fun to make different noises”, “catching creatures is fun”, and recognised that the game was “to learn about different noises and how loud they are”. While some thought the game was “more for younger children” or “I didn’t like it … [because] other games are more fun”, the majority of children had positive reviews of the game.
The IMI surveys showed a high level of motivation which was highly statistically significant and this was maintained over the study period for the eight children who completed both IMI surveys. We used a subscale of this survey to quantify their attitudes towards science, which showed that children did perceive science to be constructive and beneficial to learn, with a slight increase over the study period. However, statistical tests showed that this was not a statistically significant increase.
Our subsequent publication goes into these results in further detail (see below).
We published a peer-reviewed research paper on this project to the ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference in 2023. The paper can be viewed and downloaded via the link below.
Hannah Qiao, Hussel Suriyaarachchi, Sankha Cooray, and Suranga Nanayakkara. 2023. Snatch and Hatch: Improving Receptivity Towards a Nature of Science with a Playful Mobile Application. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 278–288. https://doi.org/10.1145/3585088.3589384
Download PDFCurrently, only the sound sensor (measuring decibels) is available on Hopu. To promote greater access and playful experiences with other sensors, we plan to build features that will incorporate the ability to measure sound frequency, light, magnetic field, or the positioning and orientation of the mobile device. There has also been a consistent demand for more content and creatures to discover. In its current stage, Hopu is available to download on Google Play and the App Store.
Relevant links: hopuhopu.com, ahlab.org/project/hopu
