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Designing a User-Friendly Educational Game for Older Adults

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Advances in Web-Based Learning – ICWL 2019 (ICWL 2019)

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Abstract

Given the importance of a well-constructed educational gaming interface and the costs involved in its development, it is important to identify the ergonomic requirements to be considered during the design process to ensure that the game be adapted to the characteristics of seniors. In a study of seniors aged 55 and older, we created and tested an educational game, “In Anticipation of Death”, in order to measure usability in the sense of determining the intuitive capacity of the game (user-friendliness). This paper presents the variables of the study, the way we adapted the game Solitaire for seniors and the results of an experiment done with 42 older players. The latter showed a high degree of satisfaction with game navigation, the display mode and gameplay equipment. Recommendations are presented to guide the development of online educational games for seniors.

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Acknowledgements

These two research studies were funded in part by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and from AGE-WELL NCE, Inc., a member of the Networks of Centres of Excellence of Canada. We would like to thank Curt Ian Wright for the translation, and Alice Ireland for editing.

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Correspondence to Louise Sauvé , David Kaufman or Patrick Plante .

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Sauvé, L., Kaufman, D., Plante, P. (2019). Designing a User-Friendly Educational Game for Older Adults. In: Herzog, M., Kubincová, Z., Han, P., Temperini, M. (eds) Advances in Web-Based Learning – ICWL 2019. ICWL 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11841. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35758-0_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35758-0_4

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