ABSTRACT
With the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have used applications to help citizens to be informed about the disease. Some applications use chatbots, which despite the advances, still represent challenges for researchers and designers in the domain of human-computer interaction (HCI). Therefore, this paper aims to evaluate three Brazilian government chatbots focused on COVID-19, considering two perspectives: communication (which involves communicability and language) and personality. For this, we used the Semiotic Inspection Method (SIM) to evaluate the chatbots' communicability and best practice guidelines for evaluating the chatbots' language and personality. As a result, we show that chatbots make little use of communicability strategies. In addition, they do not convey personality traits. We also discussed the relationship between personality and the designer's self-expression, making room for potential future work in the area. The research contributes to the extent that the study of COVID-19 chatbots in the current pandemic scenario is important and presents a methodology for assessing the language and personality of chatbots. © 2021 ACM.
ABSTRACT
Smartphones have been an alternative resource in emergency remote learning. In this paper, we introduce the Opi application, an educational game aimed at students from the 1st to the 5th grade of elementary school. The application was developed with the objective of contributing to the engagement and motivation of children in the context of remote classes during the Covid-19 pandemic, in addition to promoting the participation of parents in the process. The main functionalities and characteristics of Opi are described from a mobile game-based learning framework. We report the usability evaluation carried out with children and parents, listing the problems found and the suggestions and feedback. It ends with some lessons learned on the design and evaluation for children in the context of the pandemic and of mobile game-based learning. © 2021 ACM.