New generations of students are highly involved with technology. Therefore, while coming to traditional classrooms, it is required to call for different forms of teaching that are more motivating and engaging for them. One approach to this problem is combining games and education. Gamification could be defined as the use of game design elements in non‐game contexts. The research gap in the literature could be found in requiring more experimental studies assessing if gamification can improve learning outcomes. To this end, this paper further contributes to determining if a gamified social e‐learning platform can improve the learning performance and engagement of MSc students. The developed platform combined submission of activities with points, achievements, leaderboards, and rewards (with a virtual store) and social elements such as friends, forums, Q&A, blogs, and microblogging. Results show that, indeed, social gamification is a suitable technique to improve the learning outcome of students, at least for those skills related to programming, providing more communication skills and producing more engagement and motivation while using the platform.
With the rise of mobile devices and the high number of instant messaging applications available in the stores, it is necessary to evaluate the usability of such applications to provide a more satisfying user experience. To this end, this paper presents a methodical usability evaluation of instant messaging applications both in iOS and Android platforms. A predefined evaluation was used, which was created to detect the main usability issues of mobile applications, regardless of the device used and the evaluated applications. Consequently, two methods were used: the keystroke level model and the mobile heuristic evaluation. Also, the results suggest that the main problems of this type of applications are difficulties in performing tasks (some of them were not agile nor easy to complete), lack of element cohesion (some icons and buttons did not follow the style of the operating system, bad translations, and too much information on the screen), problems with the user interface (pop-ups overlapping the status bar, clipped elements, sometimes the interface did not rotate, and, in other cases, the interface changed considerably when the device was rotated), and lack of information about privacy and security features. Finally, based on the results, we propose a set of recommendations that will be helpful for developers of this kind of applications.
Nowadays, instant messaging applications (apps) are one of the most popular applications for mobile devices with millions of active users. However, mobile devices present hardware and software characteristics and limitations compared with personal computers. Hence, to address the usability issues of mobile apps, a specific methodology must be conducted. This paper shows the findings from a systematic analysis of these applications on iOS mobile platform that was conducted to identify some usability issues in mobile applications for instant messaging. The overall process includes a Keystroke-Level Modeling and a Mobile Heuristic Evaluation. In the same trend, we propose a set of guidelines for improving the usability of these apps. Based on our findings, this analysis will help in the future to create more effective mobile applications for instant messaging.
Intelligent mobile phones, or simply smartphones, have seen a large widespread usage among the entire world population during the last years. These devices are, in fact, considered as an essential tool in our current day to day life activities. Aromatherapy could be defined as the medical usage of essential oils derived from diverse types of vegetables. Although this paper does not look through direct medical usages or benefits, it is focused on one of its main effects, the stimuli to enhance focus. This study makes use of one of the main essential oils, rosemary, as olfactory stimuli over regular users performing a set of tasks with mobile apps. Results of the experimental group, when compared to regular users not affected with olfactory stimuli, aim to suggest that there is not a clear impact on mobile users’ performance. Nonetheless, more research is needed to categorize the effects of aromatherapy on mobile users.
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