Endurability, Engagement and Expectations: Measuring Children’s Fun

This paper describes a toolkit for measuring fun with children aged between 5 and 10. The relationship of fun to usability is discussed and three dimensions of fun; Endurability, Engagement, and Expectations are described. A set of tools that can be used in empirical studies to measure these dimensions of fun is described in detail. These tools include a Smileyometer, a Fun-Sorter and an AgainAgain table. Three user trials, in which the tools have been used, are described and suggestions are made for the use of each of the tools with children. A discussion of the efficacy of the tools presents the findings that there is a sufficient subset that can be used to give a reliable measure of fun. Dependent on the nature of the event being evaluated and on the number of activities being compared; the subset will be differently constructed. The paper concludes with observations about the difficulties of measuring fun with children, and some areas for further work are presented.