The Usability of Digital Game-based Learning for Low Carbon Awareness: Heuristic Evaluation

Digital Game-based Learning (DGBL) that attracts many practitioners to engage students in promoting low carbon awareness has been understudied. The evaluation phase plays a crucial part in determining the usability of the learning material. This study aims to identify the usability of DGBL which consists of four components: game usability (GU), mobility (MO), playability (P), and learning contents (LC) from the perspective of targeted end-user using heuristic evaluation. This study will also provide recommendations to help improve the quality of any related DGBL for novice designers or practitioners. A prototype of DGBL was developed which aims to promote low carbon awareness by learning about fuel cell. The study was designed in two phases, which are (1) developing the heuristic evaluation instrument validated by experts and (2) playtesting to identify the issues of usability in DGBL via heuristic evaluation by targeted end-users, which are forty-six selected students aged fourteen years old. Hence, it shows that the DGBL prototype developed for fuel cell learning has succeeded in achieving learning objectives while promoting low carbon awareness.