Design and evaluation of educational kinesthetic game to encourage collaboration for kindergarten children

UPDATED---31 October 2015. This paper discusses an educational game for kindergarten children to encourage collaboration between them. A game (Tata N Taro Adventure) was designed for children from 4 to 6 years old to encourage collaborations between children in remote and local environments. For this purpose, two classrooms are connected via the Internet. The game content was designed to include multiple gameplays to support a variety of collaboration types. Kinect was used as the interaction device for children. The game was developed using unity game engine. The effectiveness of the game for encouraging collaboration was examined by observing children's engagement levels and interactions from the viewpoints of the collaboration scheme, game structure, and the usage of the Kinect. The experiments were conducted at 3 kindergartens with 38 children participating in total. The results show that with the proposed game design, children gained motivation to interact more with their peers and to compete healthily with each other.