Developing a Dashboard for Monitoring Usability of Educational Games Apps for Children

Nowadays digital game applications or interactive children's educational games implemented in mobile devices (to be identified as Apps), are beginning to be widely used to complement children's education, particularly during early childhood education. However, digital game Apps do not generate a timely collection of data that could be obtained, so that with a proper interpretation they can serve as a guide in making decisions about the content, types, and level of games that should be created as digital tools to support children's education. In this article, is indicated how through the development of a dashboard, linked to a database in the cloud, it is possible to obtain and present information that allows measuring the use and playability and usability factors for these types of Apps, in an orderly and precise manner. For the development of the dashboard and its link in real time with the Apps to monitor, JavaScript was used through the framework Sails.js and the database implemented in PostgreSQL. In parallel, for the data transmission tests, two mobile applications were implemented in Android, one programmed in Unity and the second using Adobe Animate. Both Apps were designed by recording internal data in JSON file format. To analyze and obtain results, we used PQM metrics 2014 (Playability Quality Model), and we applied an adapted theory which helps to facilitate the identification of factors affecting the use and adoption of information systems and technologies in Latin American local contexts. The Pilot tests were carried out with children from 4 to 8 years attending schools of marginal areas in the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador. These children with little knowledge of technology use, facilitate better evaluation of different scenarios to measure the behavioral use of the Apps and their contents without significant influence of previous knowledge about digital educational games. This article presents the first results of an extensive and longitudinal multidisciplinary research, relevant to organizations and people involved in early childhood education.