Mobile Learning Game Authoring Tools: Assessment, Synthesis and Proposals
This work addresses the limited adoption of MLGs by teachers due to non-reusable designs and authoring tools not adapted for non-experts, proposing an incremental improvement to enhance usability.
The paper assessed five existing Mobile Learning Game (MLG) authoring tools for usability with teachers and identified limitations in adaptability for non-experts, then proposed a new design approach tailored to teachers' profiles and needs to address these gaps.
Mobile Learning Games (MLGs) show great potential for increasing engagement, creativity and authentic learning. Yet, despite their great potential for education, the use of MLGs by teachers, remains limited. This is partly due to the fact that MLGs are often designed to match a specific learning context, and thus cannot be reusable for other contexts. Therefore, researchers have recently designed various types of MLG authoring tools. However, these authoring tools are not always adapted to non-computer-scientists or non-game-designers. Hence, we propose in this paper to focus on five existing MLG authoring tools, in order to assess their features and usability with the help of five teachers, who are used to organizing educational field trips. In the second part of this paper, we present an approach for designing a MLG authoring tool, based on the lacks identified through the analysis, and tailored to the teachers' different profiles and needs.