The Story of Safety Snail and Her e-Mail: A Digital Wellness and

Cybersecurity Serious Game for Pre-School Children

unther R. Drevin

, Dirk P. Snyman

, Lynette Drevin

, Hennie A. Kruger

and Johann Allers

School of Computer Science and Information Systems, North-West University,

11 Hoffman Street, Potchefstroom, South Africa

Keywords:

Digital Wellness for Children, e-Mail Security Awareness, Serious Games.

Abstract:

Cyber threats are part of our everyday life. Even children are exposed to cyberspace as they are provided

with electronic devices that have online connectivity. Due to their vulnerability and lack of education about

cyber threats, there is a need to address their digital wellness. Digital wellness refers to one’s complete well-

being in cyberspace. This is a balance between one’s mental and physical state when using different digital

technologies. This is achieved by developing a serious game that incorporates educational and game elements

appropriate to the targeted age group. The aim of this paper is to present aspects of this game, in which the

story of “Safety Snail’s e-mail” is used to address their digital wellness regarding e-mail related threats as

an example of online interaction. The methods used were, designing and developing a serious game based

on critical game elements from literature, and making use of a structured expert review to validate the game

and elements thereof. The review indicated that the critical game elements as identiﬁed in literature were

successfully used in the game. This research further contributes by identifying ﬁve additional game elements

through analysis of the expert review feedback. It is shown in this paper how a serious game, using critical

game elements and age appropriate stories, can address the digital wellness of pre-school children.

1 INTRODUCTION

The advent of the information age has irrevocably

changed the way in which we work and socialise,

even more so in developing countries. For all the con-

venience we associate with the contemporary tech-

nological landscape, our exposure to possible harm

with respect to our privacy and security has similarly

increased. Children have traditionally been deemed

a vulnerable population, especially outside the home

as was evident in erstwhile awareness campaigns in

(pre-)schools that often sought to teach children about

concepts such as stranger danger, referring to the

possible abuse or abduction by persons unknown. In

today’s world, the proverbial stranger is no longer

only a danger outside the home, but is one that is prac-

tically invited into the residence through digital chan-

nels. Parents (and caregivers), especially in develop-

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9173-9542

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7360-3214

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9370-8216

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8514-4422

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6896-4020

ing countries, are cognisant of physical dangers that

children are confronted with, however, they have little

knowledge of the threats that cyberspace can hold for

their children. Therefore, they may not be equipped to

provide them with the required knowledge and skills.

This lack of awareness leads to children being given

carte blanche access to electronic devices and the in-

ternet without appropriate supervision. It is therefore

paramount that awareness is created among both chil-

dren and parents about these threats and novel inter-

ventions are staged to equip children to be safe and

happy in the digital sphere.

This can be referred to as their overall digital well-

ness. The digital wellness education of pre-school

children (typically between the ages of ﬁve and six)

in particular poses a unique challenge as they are typ-

ically only starting to learn to read and traditional text

based approaches will not be effective.

Literature shows that imaginative play is a feasi-

ble way to teach pre-school children (Yogman et al.,

2018). When combined with visual and auditory

stimulation, play provides a creative space for chil-

dren to interact with new concepts and knowledge.

Drevin, G., Snyman, D., Drevin, L., Kruger, H. and Allers, J.

The Story of Safety Snail and Her e-Mail: A Digital Wellness and Cybersecurity Serious Game for Pre-School Children.

DOI: 10.5220/0011682200003405

In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy (ICISSP 2023), pages 519-527

ISBN: 978-989-758-624-8; ISSN: 2184-4356

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

519

Given the contemporary digital immersion of children

and their eagerness to interact with these technolo-

gies, and given the feasibility of play as a teaching

method, it stands to reason that a mobile serious game

provides an ideal way of teaching children about dig-

ital wellness and cybersecurity concepts. A serious

game is an application that has the ”purpose of inﬂu-

encing the players’ thoughts and actions in real life

contexts” (Mitgutsch and Alvarado, 2012).

A number of games targeted at children with the

goal of teaching or spreading awareness of cybersecu-

rity exist, however, in the current literature there are

no games with a focus on pre-school children (Hill

et al., 2020) and, therefore, the novelty of this re-

search, which was part of an MSc project (Allers,

2021), is the creation of such a game to contribute

to ﬁlling this gap. The game, as proposed in this re-

search, is intended to be used under the supervision of

a parent and, therefore, can contribute to the simulta-

neous education of both parent and child. The focus

of this paper is, however, to present an evaluation of

the game that is based on the experience of the child

through the lens of expert reviewers in pre-school ed-

ucation. The expert review is performed with a view

to improve upon the current iteration of the game be-

fore it is play-tested by the target group in the follow-

ing phase of this ongoing project. The paper further

contributes the identiﬁcation of new critical game el-

ements from the expert review that can be used in the

development of similar games.

The remainder of this paper is deployed in the fol-

lowing manner: Existing digital wellness materials

for pre-school children is presented in Section 2. Sec-

tion 3 is used to illustrate how digital wellness and cy-

bersecurity can be taught by means of a serious game.

The game that was developed as part of this research

is presented in Section 4 and the results of an expert

evaluation of this game is discussed in Section 5. The

contribution of this research, i.e., newly identiﬁed ele-

ments of serious game design for pre-school children

is discussed in Section 6. The study is concluded with

a summary and a look ahead to possible future work

in Section 7.

2 DIGITAL WELLNESS FOR

PRE-SCHOOL CHILDREN

Digital technologies have a direct and growing impact

on the well-being of its users. Just as it is important to

maintain a good and healthy lifestyle to ensure a pos-

itive well-being in the physical realm, it is important

to maintain a good and healthy lifestyle in the digi-

tal realm to ensure a positive well-being. This fact

leads to the need for a new evaluation, measure or

standard to determine the well-being of users in the

digital realm and that standard is called digital well-

ness and is deﬁned by Von Solms and Fischer as fol-

lows:

“Digital wellness refers to the notion of ‘being

well in a digital society’. It is characterised by the

ability of users to discern between the dangers and

opportunities found in the cyberspace, act responsi-

bly, and align their online behaviour with their ofﬂine

values - to remain cyber safe.” (Von Solms and Fis-

cher, 2017, p. 156)

Digital wellness is, therefore, a measure of a

user’s well-being as affected by the use of digital tech-

nologies. This well-being not only refers to one’s

physical state of health, but also to the mental effects

that the use of these technologies may have. Further-

more, digital well-being is not only dependent on how

a person uses these digital technologies, but it is also

affected by the user’s ability to identify dangers in the

cyber realm and how the user acts on these dangers.

A gap concerning serious games for the promo-

tion of digital wellness, as deﬁned above, among pre-

school children was identiﬁed from literature. One

example of the limited digital wellness content aimed

at pre-school children, is that of “Digital wellnests:

Let us play in safe nests”

. This electronically avail-

able book (Fischer and Von Solms, 2016; Von Solms

and Fischer, 2017) has the goal to promote a cyberse-

curity culture speciﬁcally for pre-school children. It

uses simple explanations as well as animals, that are

familiar to African children, as the main characters.

The book consists of concepts, poems, and mes-

sages, that introduce digital wellness and cybersecu-

rity topics to pre-school children. Selected content

from the book was therefore used as the digital well-

ness fundamentals around which the game was built.

The main content of the book is provided in the

form of poems. Each of these poems features animals

interacting with technology and ends with a moral les-

son. Easy to remember short messages, that serve as

important cybersecurity-related lessons, supplement

the main content (Von Solms and Fischer, 2017).

One of the poems, Safety Snail’s e-mails, tells

the story of a snail who receives an e-mail from a

stranger. Instead of opening and reading the e-mail,

she decided to delete the message. The moral lesson

of the story is to not open any suspicious e-mails (and

other messages) from unknown sources, and therefore

addresses the online security and privacy element of

digital wellness. The accompanying short message

https://www.up.ac.za/african-centre-of-excellence-

for-information-ethics/article/2109737/digital-wellness-

toolkit

ICISSP 2023 - 9th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy

520

roughly matches the moral of the Safety Snail’s e-

mails story (Fischer and Von Solms, 2016):

“Remember the golden rule, Online, in a

game or outside your school. Don’t talk to

a stranger. This will keep you safe from dan-

ger” (Fischer and Von Solms, 2016, p.37)

Even though pre-school children typically do not yet

make use of e-mail as such, they can still be exposed

to this and other online social interaction at an early

age. It is, therefore, imperative that an awareness of

the possible dangers is established early on so that

they are prepared when they are inevitably confronted

with a suspicious interaction. A parallel is also drawn

between strangers in cyberspace and in the physical

realm. It should be noted that, while the example

of e-mail safety is used in this paper, the resulting

game covers more cybersecurity and digital wellness

aspects (Allers, 2021).

To better understand how to spread awareness of

cybersecurity and digital wellness among pre-school

children, it is imperative to identify how pre-schoolers

learn and develop important skills. The early experi-

ences that children have, play a big role in their over-

all development and exposing them to the concepts of

digital wellness can have signiﬁcant beneﬁts (McCall

et al., 2019).

Pre-school children are still at the age of learn-

ing through play (Yogman et al., 2018). Play is a fun

way for children to learn, regardless of their preferred

method of learning. Play allows children the oppor-

tunity to observe, listen, explore, experiment and ask

questions to solve problems. These are all methods

used by pre-school children to learn (Matthews et al.,

2007).

By using play as a tool for learning, the method of

teaching is not limited to only one or two of the differ-

ent ways of learning mentioned above, but can instead

be set up to include all of these methods. By creating

a game speciﬁcally aimed at children, it is possible to

stimulate all forms of learning using only one learn-

ing medium. It is, however, important to note that

even though the game is aimed at pre-school children,

that parent involvement and guidance is of great im-

portance in playing the game and to learn the lesson

presented in the game.

3 SERIOUS GAMES FOR

DIGITAL WELLNESS

It was shown that serious games have potential to be

used as a tool for education and awareness of digital

wellness. In this section, attention is given to the prin-

ciples that are important for the design of educational

serious games in general, followed by a discussion of

the elements that are speciﬁc to games aimed at pre-

school children.

3.1 Guiding Principles for Educational

Game Design

The design and development of effective educational

games have received much attention in literature in

the past few decades (Charsky, 2010; Malone and

Lepper, 1987; Mildner et al., 2015; Mitgutsch and

Alvarado, 2012). The goal is to formalise elements

that, when included in the design and development of

a game, will result an objectively good product.

For the purposes of this study, the elements iden-

tiﬁed by (Mildner et al., 2015) were implemented.

Their work was informed by a number of previous

studies that investigated critical elements that con-

tribute to making a good game and is therefore repre-

sentative of these types of investigations. They iden-

tify the following critical elements:

Challenge describes the problem or issue that has

to be resolved by the player (Mildner et al., 2015) and

requires a certain level of skill (Charsky, 2010; Mal-

one and Lepper, 1987). An in-game task that is either

too challenging, or not challenging enough, would

have a negative effect on the player’s motivation and

enjoyment (Cowley et al., 2008).

Fantasy in a game, is the theme or setting of the

game that distinguishes it from reality. It motivates

players through increasing their involvement (Malone

and Lepper, 1987) by either expanding their knowl-

edge, or rewarding them (Charsky, 2010).

Choice refers to the options that a player has prior

to, as well as during, a game. There are three forms

of choice (Charsky, 2010). Expressive choices, such

as picking or creating an avatar. Strategic choices, or

game settings, that directly inﬂuence the gameplay,

e.g. selecting the difﬁculty level. Finally, tactical

choices are made while playing the game by, choos-

ing answers from multiple prompts, and choosing be-

tween different paths to travel, as examples.

The Rules of a game is a set of constraints that

limit the actions that a player can perform. In contrast

to fantasy, a game’s rules anchors it in reality and en-

ables the lessons learned in the game to be translated

to real life (Charsky, 2010).

Competition and goals form one of the most im-

portant elements of games, as most games incorporate

this element (Charsky, 2010). Goal refers to the win-

ning conditions of a game, while competition refers

to the obstacles that need to be overcome to reach the

goal.

The Story of Safety Snail and Her e-Mail: A Digital Wellness and Cybersecurity Serious Game for Pre-School Children

521

Aesthetics, or the overall presentation of the

game, refers to the visual and auditory appeal it

evokes. It is used to get the player interested in the

game and players are more likely to complete a game

that is aesthetically pleasing (Mildner et al., 2015;

Mitgutsch and Alvarado, 2012).

Two further principles identiﬁed in literature (Din-

celli and Chengalur-Smith, 2020), speciﬁc to games

aimed at teaching, were also considered and imple-

mented:

Story-based agents, or game characters, should

be employed to contextualise learning and act as fa-

cilitators of the learning process.

Reﬂection opportunities provide the player with

structured opportunities to reﬂect on their learning

experience and what they have learnt. The follow-

ing sub-section is dedicated to game elements that are

speciﬁc to games aimed at pre-school children.

3.2 Serious Games for Pre-School

Children

When considering the use of games for teaching in

the context of children’s growing exposure to digi-

tal technology (Callaghan and Reich, 2018), it ap-

pears to be a viable approach to spread awareness

about digital wellness topics. This has become evi-

dent by the number of serious games targeted directly

at older children. Even though serious games tar-

geted at pre-school children have become more popu-

lar over time (Shuler et al., 2012) these games are not

necessarily optimised for this target audience. In a

framework for games aimed speciﬁcally at teaching

pre-school children, the following design elements

were established (Callaghan and Reich, 2018):

Clear and Simple Goals - Children learn best

with clear instructions and modelling which allows

them to draw connections to existing beliefs (Cowley

et al., 2008). This empowers them to complete their

tasks with minimal disruption;

Quality of Feedback and Rewards - Feedback

is used to encourage children and notify them when

they do something wrong. At pre-school age, most

children are not able to read and thus text feedback is

not of any help to the child. Combine both visual and

auditory feedback should rather be used;

Structure of Challenge - When structuring a

challenge in a game, the level of performance of the

target audience should be kept in mind. Adaptive

scaffolding, i.e. dynamically increasing or decreas-

ing difﬁculty levels, can greatly enhance the child’s

learning experience; and

Motion Based Interactions - Various physical ac-

tions can serve as an alternative to complex touch

screen or pointer interactions that might be too difﬁ-

cult for many children. By being mindful of the physi-

cal capabilities of pre-school children (e.g., touchable

object sizes, simpliﬁed touchscreen motions at ﬁrst,

etc.), the overall experience of the child will improve.

The four elements listed above are essential to en-

sure that a game is suited to a pre-school aged child

and was therefore used in conjunction with the other

design elements (Section 3.1) to guide the develop-

ment of the game in this research.

4 DIGITAL WELLNESTS GAME

In this section, an overview of the application is given.

This is done by highlighting the layout and function

of each scene and its components. The resulting se-

rious game consists of four main scenes. Each of

these scenes contribute to the main goal of spreading

awareness of digital wellness among pre-school chil-

dren, by implementing some of the elements identi-

ﬁed in Section 3.1 and Section 3.2 thereby increasing

the overall fun factor of the game which adds to the

overall motivation and enjoyment experienced by the

children.

Main Menu - The main menu screen (Figure 1)

which serves as a selection screen for picking the

poem and associated quiz and game that the child will

play.

Poems - In this scene the selected poem (Figure

2) will be displayed on the screen and it will be read

to the child. The main goal of this scene is to edu-

cate the child and spread awareness of the dangers of

cyberspace in an enjoyable way.

Quiz - The aim of the quiz scene (Figure 3) is to

determine whether or not the child understands the

problem described in the poem by motivating them

to answer four questions about the topic. The quiz

does not block progress if the child’s results are sub-

par. The child’s progress does not get blocked for two

reasons: The goal of the game is not to educate in

the sense of formal teaching and learning activities,

including formative and summative assessments, but

rather to spread awareness on the material. Aware-

ness being informal teaching without an emphasis on

assessment and performance. Therefore, the quiz is

only meant to be used by parents as a tool to motivate

the child to keep track of their efforts and progression.

Game - This scene allows the child to play a mini-

game based on the poem that they have chosen and

serves as reward for completing the poem and quiz

scenes. Instructions and goal of the game are dis-

played on the screen and read out loud (shown in Fig-

ure 4). The child can then use the slider to pick a level

ICISSP 2023 - 9th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy

522

Figure 1: Application main menu.

Figure 2: Poem scene.

and play the game.

The objective of the game (Figure 4) is to move

the different coloured envelopes to the same colour

column before the envelope reaches the bottom. This

game is an exercise in small motor movement and

colour matching and has the underlying message of

sorting through e-mails and either answering or ig-

noring the message based on its appearance.

To validate the overall applicability of the game

and how well the above-mentioned design elements

were implemented, the opinions of a number of pre-

school education experts were sought. The results of

the evaluation are presented in the next section.

5 EXPERT REVIEW

Six experts in the ﬁeld of pre-school education were

approached to give their feedback on the game. They

were asked to comment on the critical game elements

identiﬁed from literature, and to suggest any other ele-

ments that they deem necessary for the overall success

The Story of Safety Snail and Her e-Mail: A Digital Wellness and Cybersecurity Serious Game for Pre-School Children

523

Figure 3: Quiz question screen (left) and results (right).

Figure 4: Safety Snail’s e-mail game menu screen (left) and game (right) .

of the game.

The reviews were conducted using a questionnaire

which was followed by an interview. The question-

naire elicited responses about the reviewers’ experi-

ence and opinion of the problem; a review of the game

and the design elements that were implemented in

the game, based on Likert scale responses (the higher

end of the scale representing positive sentiment); and

questions about additional elements that could be

identiﬁed. The follow-up interview was used to gain

a better understanding of how the reviewers reacted to

each design element and to gather more information

on the additional elements that they identiﬁed. The

information regarding the background and experience

of the reviewers is given in Table 1.

All the reviewers had either a good or very good

understanding of the different dangers and threats of

the cyberspace and digital technologies, but also in-

dicated that they believe that the parents of the chil-

dren are not very aware of these dangers. When asked

whether or not the reviewers believe that the parents

effectively teach the children about these dangers, all

responded negatively. Even though ﬁve of the six re-

viewers indicated that they believe that the current

level of exposure of children to digital technologies

is problematic, none were aware of any resources that

can be used to promote digital wellness and cyberse-

curity and none of the reviewers used any resources

for this purpose.

5.1 Validation of the Game

The validation of the game was conducted using a

scoring system. After playing the game multiple

times, the reviewers were asked to score the imple-

mentation of each element on a Likert scale of one

to ﬁve, where one indicates poor to no implementa-

tion and ﬁve indicates excellent implementation. The

average implementation score of each element, with

comments from the reviewers is given in Table 2.

These results indicate that the implementation of each

element was satisfactory. The reviewers were also

asked to score the game based on the following cri-

teria: how much fun the game is; how suitable the

game is for pre-school children; and how effective the

game will promote the awareness of digital wellness.

All three of these criteria were awarded an average

score of 4.5 out of 5 and a range of 4-5.

ICISSP 2023 - 9th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy

524

Table 1: Reviewer information.

Information Reviewer responses

Years of experience Total: 168, Average: 28

Age of children that reviewer works with Youngest: 3, Oldest: 9

Awareness of the dangers of cyberspace 4/5 (Good)

Children’s exposure to digital and online technologies 4.3/5 (A lot - too much)

View of whether this level of exposure is a problem Yes: 5, No: 1, Maybe: 0

Knowledge of existing resources that promote awareness

of digital wellness to pre-school children Yes: 1, No: 5

Use existing resources that promote awareness

of digital wellness to pre-school children Yes: 0, No: 6

View on parents’ awareness of the dangers of cyberspace 2.2/5 (Poor - average)

View on parents’ effectiveness teaching children of the

dangers of cyberspace 1.5/5 (Very poor - poor)

5.2 Validation of the Elements

Identiﬁed in Literature

The validation of the elements identiﬁed from litera-

ture was done during interviews. The reviewers were

asked which elements they felt were unnecessary or

not critical and also which elements they deemed

most important. This was done to verify that the el-

ements identiﬁed from literature can be considered

critical elements.

The reviewers stated that all the elements iden-

tiﬁed from literature can be considered critical ele-

ments. One reviewer noted that if even one of the

elements were not implemented, the game would be

dramatically less effective.

Even though the reviewers indicated that each of

the identiﬁed elements are critical, they did highlight

certain elements as being more important than oth-

ers. The most important elements according to the

reviewers, ranked from most important to least impor-

tant, are (the score in parentheses shows the number

of experts that identiﬁed the element as important):

Aesthetics (6); Appropriate content (5); Structured

challenge (2); Feedback and rewards (2); and Ap-

propriate interface (1). It is important to note that

these ﬁve elements are just the elements that the re-

viewers felt contribute most to the ﬁnal goal. The best

results will be obtained when all elements are incor-

porated into the game design.

6 NEWLY IDENTIFIED SERIOUS

GAME DESIGN ELEMENTS

During the interview that followed the evaluation,

each reviewer was asked to identify any additional

elements, that, when implemented in a mobile seri-

ous game, should result in a game that effectively

promotes digital wellness among pre-school children.

One of the main results of the review process is the

identiﬁcation of the following design elements aimed

speciﬁcally at pre-school children:

Balanced Simplicity and Complexity - One of

the reviewers pointed out the importance of not over-

simplifying serious games. The intelligence of chil-

dren should not be underestimated, as they will

quickly lose interest in anything that is oversimpli-

ﬁed. This may be seen as an extension of the original

simplicity element.

Short Playtime - Children have active brains and

thus a short attention span. In order to optimize the

effects of the awareness project, it is crucial that the

child does not lose focus. There are two methods of

achieving this: one is to use engaging visuals and au-

dio to attract attention; and the other is to limit play

time to the length of the child’s attention span.

Balanced Work and Play - A reviewer men-

tioned that many serious games for children are overly

focused on the serious (work) aspect of the game.

This may result in a game where the child feels forced

to play without experiencing fun. It is important that

there should be a balance between work and play to

ensure that the game is both fun and effective.

Quality Interactions - While playing a game, the

only method of communication to and from the game

is done via the interactions made available by the

application itself. In order to ensure that this com-

munication is clear and effective, it is necessary that

the interactions of an application are of a high quality

and comprehensive.

Further investigation of these elements in the de-

sign and development of serious games aimed at pre-

school children is required.

The Story of Safety Snail and Her e-Mail: A Digital Wellness and Cybersecurity Serious Game for Pre-School Children

525

Table 2: Reviewer scores.

Game Average Answer Comments

element score range

Challenge 4 3-5 “The younger children might ﬁnd the app too challenging.”

(interview)

Fantasy 4.3 3-5 “The animal theme was very ﬁtting and the children will

love it.” (interview)

Choice 4.5 4-5 “More stories” (suggestion for further development)

Rules 4.5 4-5 N/A

Competition and goals 4.5 4-5 N/A

Aesthetics 4.3 3-5 “Was colourful.”, “Visuals”, “It is very interactive and

colourful.” (on which elements stood out most)

Clear and simple goals 4 3-5 “Clearer instructions on how the story works. (click to

turn the page etc.)” (suggestion for further development)

Feedback and rewards 4 3-5 “Good feedback, but more colours can be good.”

(Overall comments)

Structured challenge 4 3-5 “I love the different levels of play”, “More difﬁcult levels

are too difﬁcult (in envelope game)” (interview)

Appropriate interface 4.3 3-5 “This application is very child friendly. I will not change a

thing. ” (suggestion for further development)

Simplicity 4 3-5 “Do not over simplify it [the content of the game]”,

“Don’t underestimate the children’s intelligence”

(interview)

Appropriate materials 4.5 4-5 “The animal theme was very ﬁtting and the children will

love it.”, “The different concepts are explained to them

(the children) very well.” (interview)

Appropriate method of 4.5 4-5 “I like that it [the game] uses sounds, pictures and

presenting the materials words so everyone can understand it.” (interview)

Focusing on different 3.5 3-4 “More stories” (suggestion for further development)

topics

7 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

WORK

In this paper, a mobile serious game to promote the

digital wellness and cybersecurity of pre-school chil-

dren was presented. Section 2, highlighted exist-

ing digital wellness materials for pre-school children.

Section 3 was used to illustrate how digital wellness

can be taught by means of a serious game. The game

that was developed as part of this research was pre-

sented in Section 4 and the results of an expert eval-

uation of this game was discussed in Section 5. In

Section 6, novel elements of serious game design for

pre-school children that were identiﬁed through the

review process was discussed.

A possible limitation of this research is that only

experts in pre-school education were consulted for the

evaluation. It is therefore still necessary to perform an

evaluation with experts in serious game design.

Possible future work includes the expansion of the

game to include more scenarios and related content

from the Digital wellnests book while incorporating

the new design elements that were identiﬁed in the

expert review. A pilot study can also be done where

children from the designated age group play this game

in order to get better feedback on the effectiveness of

the game. Feedback can include the observation of the

children while playing the game. Furthermore, gam-

iﬁcation concepts can be investigated as an approach

to enhance the learning experience.

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