On Wednesday we started with the second game of our GeoActivity: Geotagging. This day’s task for the children was to map point feutures on the school ground by using  symbols for basic geographic map elements: building, agriculture, vegetation, water, infrastructure, animal. Again we took 2-3 children (in total around 25 of 110) and accompanied them, taking notes.

Take a look at one of the children’s KMZ-exported mappings.

First and most important issue was our symbol design. The children did not recognize some of our symbols, e.g. water, agriculture. An important result in this usability and learning test. We will have to put more effort on the symbol designs.

This time, Roman Meyer, visiting GIS Officer from Tchad, helped us with testing. Thanks for that, Roman!

Overall the children liked this task and created nice lttle maps of the school ground.

geotagging, single user test Hide

The outdoor work started on Tuesday: During the lessons we picked 2-3 kids (in total 30 of 110) out of class to perform the single user tests of the Geocaching game. After hiding the geocaches on the school ground Theodore translated a short explanation of the actvitiy and the kids could start their search with the help of our activity and the OSM basemap.

We accompanied the children on their search, noting their problems, questions and reactions.  Their wayfinding and search time was recorded by GPS. As for usability measures we tried to encourage the children to think aloud – a new situation for most of them. Due to language barriers and missing experience we could not collect many comments on that. All in all the task was reasonable easy and all tested children found their way around the school ground, although there were some differences in time and wayfinding. A deeper analysis will follow. After the second round we realized that hiding a cache on a school ground shared by 4000 children is quite impossible… 3 of 4 boxes “disappeared” during this day.

On this day we had some help from Claudio Pajarola, a swiss GIS specialist from CGIS (Center for Geographic Information Systems) of the NUR (National University of Rwanda) and from Lote, a student of KIE (Kigali Institute of Education).

During the test runs and especially if they hit some break, we had a lot of guests and visitors, watching from behind

We even got an idea how it could look like, if some children use the laptops in collaboration mode… (in fact, these kids just used the better WiFi connectivity on this spot)

Here you go with the wayfinding of Queen, a 9 year old girl:

geocaching, single user test Hide