SkyWords: A Serious Game Τo Enhance Typing and Spelling Skills

Abstract

The last few decades serious games, a genre that does not have entertainment, enjoyment, or fun as its primary purpose, have emerged to be a great way to educate, especially since more and more people are familiar with playing games and are fond of them. The purpose of our study was to create a serious game designed and developed to help young students enhance both their typing and spelling skills, based on the expert's recommendations and guidelines. As this game is destined to be played by kids in primary school, apart from being educational it should also be entertaining enough for them and not frustrate them. To achieve this, after developing the game it was evaluated by 30 children and an experts’ evaluation was held as well. All things considered there were no major problems that emerged from the evaluation of the game. However, there are some future work that should be done to make the game meet the user’s needs. At first, a beginners’ vocabulary could be useful for children that do not have basic knowledge of the English language and maybe a progress bar of the levels remaining to be played so as to help the children not get discouraged while playing it. Moreover, several alterations to the difficulty level of the game will be made incorporating a dynamic difficulty adjustment solution.