Developing affective educational software products: Sorémo, a new method for capturing emotional states

Abstract

One means of identifying successful product designs relates to the evocation of positive emotions in users. This is particularly true of educational software designs where evoking positive emotions motivates interaction with the software. In this article, a description is given of the participatory design, development, evaluation, and use of a non-verbal, self-reporting instrument Sorémo to measure children's emotional states while using educational software. Researchers and designers of children's educational software products alike are interested in capturing the emotional impact of application features on users’ actions and learning processes. Sorémo will be used to gain emotional feedback of a child's interaction with an open learner modelling tutoring system, which represents knowledge about children's learning progress, personal characteristics, and so on. The reported cross-cultural studies adopted a participatory-design approach, to create an instrument usable by French and English children. During the design process, the emotional responses to software, of French and English school children aged 4–13, were investigated. The article includes an evaluation of the method involving children using the instrument to represent emotional states. Future plans comprise deploying the method to design affective educational software products and assessing the impact on the children's learning experiences.

Keywords:

• emotional response
• design research
• educational software
• affective self-reporting method

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Audrey Diet and her class of CE2 from the French primary school ‘Jean Zay’ for their valuable participation in the creation, design, and evaluation of Sorémo throughout the whole design process as design partners, design evaluators, and evaluators of the final product.