Summary + Review: User-centred design for a mobile learning application

I've been gearing up for dissertation research by reading just about everything on every related sub-topic. This week's theme was mobile learning. It appears to me that this was an emphasis at the Mexican Workshop on Human Computer Interaction last year, because many of the papers I found came out of that publication. I'll be discussing Wood and Romero's work on the design of an application to teach kinematics to high school physics students.

Summary: The paper describes the user-centered design process that they used to build and evaluate the GUI for a mobile program. Wood and Romero situate themselves very much on the user interface side for this paper, not evaluating learning gains at this stage. No additional papers have been published in an ACM venue, so I'm not sure if they have moved forward to evaluating learning gains at this time. The focus here is on the design process.

The first user study involved math educators who teach the use of kinematic graphs to high school students. A set of interviews were conducted in order to determine areas where software could best support students and discover common misconceptions in order to include scaffolding to support the correct understandings.

The next user study used a paper prototype presented to educational technology researchers. The focus was to determine the shape of the application. Following that, learners were involved to evaluate the interface that resulted from the first paper prototype session. This paper development occurred in two iterations, each with four or five student participants.

Those findings then were applied in a hi-fi prototype, also performed in two iterations. The results of these findings are described in a non-numeric function, as essentially, that the users found it easy to use the application in its final iteration. One of the contributions this paper claims is that different stages of prototyping may need fewer or more iterations. For example, they included zero mid-fi iterations because they deemed it inappropriate.

Review: The authors suggest an idea early on that they don't confront in their paper, namely, that building an application for iPhone plays on the popularity of the device with the target age group. This question could have been addressed in the prototyping sessions, but was not.

Another assertion made early on by the teachers they interviewed was the importance of competition and collaboration to keep interest. They acknowledge this, and discuss the functions of the application that allow for collaboration, but don't really talk about the affordances that might be provided by their application.

Wood S, Romero P. User-centred design for a mobile learning application. In: Proceedings of the 3rd Mexican Workshop on Human Computer Interaction.Vol 1. Universidad Politécnica de San Luis Potosʼ\i; 2010:77–84. Available at: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1978719 [Accessed July 18, 2011].