Designing a gamified reading app with pupils in elementary school

Playing games on mobile devices has become an integral part of younger generations’ lives. Mobile games foster, among other things, deep concentration. This paper reports on design guidelines derived from observations of six elementary school pupils’ engagement over a six-week period during an after-school reading club program. Each meeting consisted of three activities as well as reading text on the Microsoft immersive reader on an iPad, and playing a competitive reading game app, ‘Henry rennt’, which are both designed to support reading. Pupils were engaged in informal conversation with the researchers about both applications, and the authors informally observed the pupils’ engagement with the apps and each other. Patterns of engagement and comments from pupils informed the design of a new reading app. This work reports these general patterns and concludes with new research areas to pursue as a result, including the impact of: social setting on playing, in-game teaching with avatars on engagement, and speed as a measurement of skill mastery. Finally, the applicability of children’s engagement patterns is validated with adult students of German as a second language who used the app.