Abstract:

In the course of digitization, the transfer of digital skills is becoming increasingly important. Children and adolescents also come into contact with digital media more and more often. In the area of early childhood education (kindergarten) special attention must be given to a critical-reflective approach, so that children know the limits of digital media and develop the ability to control their media consumption. Educational applications could help children acquire these skills.

One problem is that early childhood educators often lack the technical skills to independently develop digital applications. Although there are modern tools that provide programming beginners with graphical programming an introduction to software development. These tools hardly go beyond the pure learning approach. It would therefore be interesting to develop a video game editor that is suitable for early childhood education.

For this reason, this paper deals with the development of a prototypical web tool for game development in the field of early childhood education.
As part of a human-centered design process, the goal was to achieve a good user experience for the target group of early childhood educators.

Therefore, a group discussion was organized early with students of childhood education in order to identify their needs and to gather ideas for the functionality of the application.

Based on the requirements and a discussion of alternatives, a new game engine was designed and implemented. A special feature of the Game Engine is the concept of graphical programming, in which symbols are combined in a simple if-then system to produce dynamic behavior. In addition, the naming of concepts and elements largely dispensed with technically sound terms.

As part of a final focus group test with students of childhood education a good user experience for the temporal dimension before use (anticipated period) was determined. The basic concepts of the application were well understood. Only four out of 31 participants did not dare to use the application at the end of the test. In addition, an online survey was used to evaluate the user experience for the period after use. Students were able to try the game engine at home for this purpose. Here, a mixed user experience and improvement potential of the application was found.

Keywords:

Early childhood education, online game.