Abstract:

The growing use of mobile applications in various areas, including education, requires the establishment of automatic mechanisms and tools that map existing information for analysis from different perspectives. Given this scenario, this paper analyzes interactive mobile applications to support music education from two different approaches. The first turns to the discovery of knowledge in databases. The second approach is directed to the establishment of a usability heuristic model aimed at evaluating the interface used by student-users of mobile learning applications (which is based on a compilation of game-oriented heuristics, ie, the playability). It should also be noted that heuristic analysis was made by use of the Nielsen heuristic problem rating scale. The combination of these approaches, which makes use of Design Science Research, seeks the establishment of measurement mechanisms that enable the evaluation and/or construction of mobile educational tools for music education, establishing ways to make content intuitive, as well as providing a curve that allows student users to stay in a flow channel that balances the difficulty of the challenge presented and the required skills. For this, a search was performed in the Google Play web store, and the 70 best rated applications were selected. Exploratory analysis showed that most apps are free to use, and 25 of the 70 apps evaluated have internal monetization. Similarly, it was also possible to institute a word cloud to corroborate the objective of the present investigation by verifying the ones that stand out. Finally, it can be stated that this combined structure of analysis makes it possible to verify general aspects and raise points for improvement or even aspects to be observed during the elaboration of games for music education.

Keywords:

Text mining, mobile apps, playability, knowledge discovery, artificial intelligence.