A Day in the Life of the JOs (The JOs)

An interdisciplinary team of interaction designers, HCI researchers, game developer, and educators , worked together to design and develop The JOs. The core team was composed of six members, with each member playing multiple roles. I was the HCI designer, researcher, game developer, and at times the project lead. The game has been positively received by schools as indicated by the following comment.

"The scenarios are great and certainly reflect our students' realities online" -- comment from school who adopted the game.

Related publications and media

• The design, development, and evaluation of a digital literacy game for preteens. PhD thesis, School of Computer Science, Carleton University, 2020.
• Sana Maqsood, Christine Mekhail, and Sonia Chiasson. A Day in the Life of JOs: A Web based Game to Increase Children’s Digital Literacy. In Interaction Design and Children (IDC), 2018
• Sana Maqsood. Evaluation of a Persuasive Digital Literacy Game for Children. In SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in Computing Systems (CHI), pages 1-6, 2018
• New video game helps kids fight online dangers. Impact story by MITACS (2018) ​

Design

I used a user-centered process to design and develop the game, evaluating it with children at each stage of the design process. Feedback from each testing iteration was shared with MediaSmarts and used to improve the game. The visual designs and their evaluations were completed by my collaborator Christine Mekhail, who was only involved with the project for the first year. 

I designed The JOs using established HCI and game design theories and principles, such as Procedural Rhetoric, Meaningful play, and Gee’s principles for learning games to create an engaging learning environment. A modular system architecture was developed to future-proof the game, and mitigate the problem of outdated content, common among real-world digital literacy resources. 

User-centered design process to develop The JOs

Research

I conducted two empirical research studies to evaluate the usability and effectiveness of The JOs with children and teachers. 

Summative user study with children
I used questionnaires and semi-structured interviews to evaluate children’s digital literacy immediately before and after playing the game, and one-week later to assess retention. Using a mixed-methods approach, I measured changes in both knowledge and behavioural intent, assessing how children approached scenarios and how they critically reflected on the consequences of their choices. Statistical analysis in SPSS showed significant positive changes in digital literacy as a result of playing the game. In addition to questionnaires and interviews, the usability of the game was evaluated using observations, an eyetracker, and data collected by the instrumented game.

Analysis: Quantitative data (e.g., time on task, improvements in learning) was analyzed using statistical analysis techniques in R and SPSS. Qualitative data (e.g., user perceptions about the game) was analyzed using thematic analysis.

Improvements in children's digital literacy after playing The JOs

Methodology for evaluating The JOs with children

Summative user study with teachers
As The JOs is meant for classroom use, I conducted a user study with 21 elementary school teachers to evaluate the usability of the game and explore how it can be used in class and integrated into lesson plans. The methodology of the study was similar to the previous study, and results showed that teachers could easily use the game into their classrooms, and it aligned with their cirriculum.

Methodology for evaluating The JOs with teachers