Design and empirical testing of a checklist for the evaluation of multimedia software for children

An expert checklist for evaluating children's software has been designed and validated on ten children in the second grade. In the first part of the investigation ten psychology students evaluated three edutainment games, all of different quality, by means of the checklist. Based on these results the items on the checklist were then analyzed and filtered (analysis of variance, item analysis). In this way the length of the checklist was reduced considerably. The remaining checklist items became the basis for calculating a new software evaluation score. In the second part of the investigation seven and eight-year-old children played with the same edutainment games as the students. While doing so they were observed and subsequently interviewed by the author. A regression analysis was used in predicting the outcome of the observation of and interviews with the children using the newly calculated checklist results. The results show that it is possible to predict children's reactions to certain edutainment games by using the checklist. Due to the low number of subjects and the use of only three different edutainment games, however, the results should be regarded as a kind of preliminary test indicating a general tendency.