Usability Evaluation of Educational Serious Games

Serious Games are increasingly sought after by people that want to have a new and fun learning experience. Usability, in the digital portion of serious games context, is one of the main determinant factors for the adoption by users of those software products. This paper aims to evaluate usability of serious games in relation to teaching and learning of languages, programming and habits. We evaluated 6 serious games in this research (e.g. Code-Academy, Checkio, Swift Playgrounds, Duolingo, Trivia Crack and Habitica) by undergraduate students. Thhis is an exploratory research, with a qualitative and quantitative approach. The data collection included a questionnaire, that was applied in a nature way to all students of the Computer Science and Software Engineering courses at the University of Brasilia. As a result, we obtained that Swift Playgrounds, Code-Academy and Checkio games are the best rated games regarding usability in the category of programming learning.