In this paper, the authors report the initial development stages of Jeliot Mobile, a tool that aims to bring the benefits of visualization to the new generation of learners that makes use of new technologies. From the research point of view the authors want to 1) frame the development of the tool in the socio-constructivist paradigm, and 2) bring the learnercenteredness via participatory design. The paper reports a series of workshops in which HCI students were asked to design a mobile tool for learning programming. The workshops followed the participatory design methodology. Each workshop set its very participants into a scenario different than other workshops by means of variation in introductory tools. The participants output-in the form of design ideas described with tools like sketches, storyboards, and/or simple text-at each workshop was then collected. These ideas were classified according to five categories: socio-constructivist, learning management, usability, software visualization, and miscellaneous. Usability and socioconstructivist accounted for the majority of the ideas. The number usability ideas can be partly explained because of the context (participants were HCI students). However, the abundance of socio-constructivist ideas points to the importance which students give to learning in a sociocultural context. Moreover, the sheer amount of ideas-otherwise not envisioned by the designers-explains the need to build mlearning tools in a participatory fashion. Thus, the results of experiments support authors' stand of designing such tools in a learner-centered participatory fashion and framing the development in socioconstructivist paradigm.
The usability evaluations (testing and inspection) are utmost important in the development of learner-centered educational technology. Poorly designed learning tools put additional interface learning load on learners' memory and cognition, which may result in significantly decreased attention to the main content learning goal. Nonetheless, discounted inspection (by usability experts) are commonly reported for such tools but expensive user-based testing is a rarity, mostly due to limited budgets and constrict timeframes. In this work, the authors propose to run discounted inspections with special enduser (domain expert) evaluators having a prior experience in usability. The authors postulate that putting discounted inspections into a participatory context shall bring the benefits of both type of usability evaluations to one. It shall also reduce costs typically associated with expensive user-based testing, thus removing hindrances. The argument is put to test via participatory heuristic evaluation experiments on a case tool with a large number of redundant evaluating groups to cross-validate results. Over 164 end-users with a prior usability experience, divided into 45 evaluating groups evaluate the case tool. The outcomes are promising. The dual-personae evaluators find significant amount of domain related problems (missed by usability experts in discounted methods) as well as interface related problems (missed by domain experts in testing), suggesting their usefulness in mixed method. The authors thus advise to evaluate the usability of low-budget educational technology projects with the proposed method.
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