Evaluating and Developing Educational Gaming Applications to Raise Awareness of Child Sexual Abuse

Nowadays, sex education is an essential requirement for children aged 6-12 years. Alongside other initiatives, introducing sex education-related games may hold immense potential in effectively detecting and preventing instances of child abuse. As a society, embracing and promoting these educational tools could lead to a safer and more informed environment for children. Therefore, the objectives of this paper are to evaluate the usability of existing sex education games for children and to propose a novel prototypical game for children’s sex education aimed at enhancing usability. To accomplish the objectives of this research, firstly, two existing games (Child Abuse Prevention and The Good Touch Game) were evaluated through Heuristic Evaluation to reveal the usability problems. Secondly, a prototype game Good Touch Bad Touch was designed and developed considering avatars (boy/girl) and animation-based stories set in three different (home, school, and playground) environments. Thirdly, its usability was assessed through the Heuristic Evaluation and System Usability Scale (SUS). Finally, the Heuristic Evaluation findings of the three games were compared. As an outcome, the study found that existing sex education-related games have significant number of usability problems (n = 15 and 16) with high severity, while a few usability problems (n=6) were found in the developed game Good Touch Bad Touch. Additionally, the developed prototypical game showed a good SUS score (82.142) which ensures high usability and user experience of the proposed game.