myRESEARCH MOTIVATION:
My personal research interests are broad and reach beyond the disciplines of Human-Computer Interaction and Children Education. Some of the research areas include usability and software testing (software engineering), edutainment, IT project management, electronic games, motivation and engagement, serious games and also gender inclusive in game design and game play. My focus area is the usability testing in developing and designing computer games for children with children. And I am currently at the early stage of the research.

Electronic game
Electronic game is a general definition used to refer to any electronic games played either in games console (such as Sony’s PlayStation, Nintendo’s GameBoy, Microsoft’s XBox), computers or handheld devices such as hand-phone, PDA, game pad). While the terminology of video games have been used in the 70s, 80s and still used until today. The terms always used tentatively with computer games and electronic games. For this research, I will only use computer games platform for the children to used as user, designer, tester and evaluator partner roles.

Edutainment
Edutainment is a combination of the terms ‘education’ and ‘entertainment’. The word edutainment has been coined to refer to the integration of educational principles with entertainment values. Edutainment software seems to be accepted more as an entertainment application rather that as an educational tool. This skewed perception makes the importance of an edutainment in learning less appreciated and acknowledged. Some believers do belief that the word edutainment should be replaced by ‘playful learning’. For me, the terminology of ‘edutainment’ is the best terms to use in this research since it has been the term labels for games with pronounced educational ambition. In fact, the closest examples of such edutainment software are the computer games.

Learning versus playing can create the same and on-going discussion as what ‘chicken-and-egg’ issue did. Until today, people still argues with their supporting evidences and proclaims. I do belief in the case of learning versus playing; edutainment can only be successfully implemented if it is possible to open up playful, creative and anxiety-free approaches to acquiring knowledge. As long as the edutainment software have the proper instructional design, education approach, pedagogy and cognitive psychology, and not forgetting the fun and excitement for players.

Classroom
By looking around in primary schools where the ICT is being used, I can suggest that new styles of learning should be implemented. Since the ICT technology is all around us, the education systems can get lots of benefits and explore the potential impact of these technologies on learners in this generation and the next. Classrooms are the best place to empower people to use ICT technologies to learn and explore new ideas. Computer games are one of it. Many questions appear in my mind – Are computer games can only be the teaching and learning tools? Can we use games to motivate children to learn? How might we design games so that educators can actually use them within classroom environments?

Children
Children are always been the participator of any research related to them. Until recently, there are some incentives on expanding the children roles. In this research, I will be focusing on the role of DTE partnership (designer, tester, and evaluator) which are actually different but yet they do have some similarity. The experience and knowledge acquired through the observations of children behaviors and activities as DTE in software development will provide useful input and understanding in developing the best edutainment software. I also expect that the product and experience in this research can be beneficial towards the area of edutainment games ~ learning, its potential, funology (is that the word?) and usability. So, after reading some papers and looking at related work, I have lots of questions to be answer concerning children.

Age: Many researchers do not recommend children under 3 years old to use the computer because they proclaimed that it does not match their learning styles. BUT schools and kindergartens are steadily increasing accessing the technology. There are also researchers saying that children 3 – 4 years old are developmentally ready to explore computers. This also was supported by the increasing amount of application being designed to teach the kids with variety of skills.

Programming & SQUEAK: Children as been a programmer since the LOGO project. Alan Kay, introduced Squeak using SmallTalk programming environment and claimed that Squeak are scalable to all ages and it was approved by many researcher. Children under 8 have limited understanding of what computer programs actually are and how they are produced. BUT they are very keen to learn how to program. Elder children start to lose their enthusiasm. The children behaviour and active participation should also be measure and analyse.

Setting: The research have been conducted in Magdeburg, Germany and Malaysia. Another point is the research setting. I have conducted the research in computer lab.

Usability
The research is a multi-disciplinary research by exploring the shared culture of a group of children (ethnographic research). More towards a qualitative research includes exploration, discover, understanding and describing phenomenon. Research tools are basically some experiment, observation and interview. The research design is to develop a prototype edutainment games with children and evaluate by children partnership values. The principles used to support usability are learn ability, flexibility and robustness. This research basically will focus on the usability testing for children and computer games (focusing on the edutainment games).