Children Designing Serious Games for Children from other Cultures

Abstract

This paper describes a study to investigate to what extent the use of sensitizing techniques can help children design a serious game for a surrogate population. In total 25 children aged 7. 8. and 9 from a UK primary participated in three design activities. The first session was intended to inform (sensitize) the children about life in rural China. The second session briefly taught the children about aspects of food hygiene and then the third session required the children to design a serious game on this subject, for children in rural China. The outputs from the children were analysed and although all the children managed to design a game, only six related this to food hygiene, with three of these having only a single element of food hygiene present. The other nineteen children created games that were unrelated to food hygiene. In addition, only one design showed any evidence of thinking about the cultural differences of the target users, those being children in rural China. More work is required to understand what children can contribute to the general development of serious games and to the specifics of thinking about other populations.

Keywords

• Children
• Serious games
• Culture
• Sensitizing
• Design