Evaluation of popularity of multi-lingual educational web games - do all children speak English?

Playing computer games is widely popular among children and teenagers as an entertainment activity; however, computer games can also be easily transformed into tools for education. City University London's City eHealth Research Centre (CeRC) has developed such educational web games as a part of a European Project, e-Bug (www.e-bug.eu) to improve pupils understanding of the importance of hand and respiratory hygiene and responsible antibiotic use. This paper studies the usage of the Games between January 2009 and March 2010, specifically for 10 European Union countries. The Games were first provided in English-only and it was found that over half of the users were from non-UK countries. Once the Games were translated into multiple European languages, it was found that users preferred to play the Games in their native tongue. Thus, English was not a hindrance to Game playing/access; however, the option of using another language was always taken once provided. Users found the website through search engines and direct links from schools and other websites, and over 60,000 visitors played the Games at least once. The quantitative data used to investigate our research questions stemmed from the Games website server logs. © 2011 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.