EduGene: A UIDP-Based Educational App Generator for Multiple Devices and Platforms
Cesar Augusto Cortes-Camarillo, Giner Alor‐Hernández, Laura Nely Sánchez-Morales, Viviana Yarel Rosales-Morales, Lisbeth Rodríguez-Mazahua, José Luis Sánchez-Cervantes · International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction · 2018
Education is key to a just and progressive society. It is specially provided by schools and reflects on various areas of our lives. The importance of education has led to new schemes in the development of educational applications. The goal of this research is to propose the design of an architecture for educational application development that relies on a set of user interface design patterns (UIDPs) to facilitate the laborious, time-consuming task of application development. To this end, this article presents the EduGene as the proof of concept. Applications generated with EduGene are compatible with four operating systems, Android™, Firefox® OS, macOS®, and Windows Phone®, and with the Web. Furthermore, EduGene is compatible with three types of devices: mobile (smartphones and tablets), desktop, and television. The evaluation results prove that EduGene is a user-friendly educational application generator, since it provides an intuitive interface that facilitates user interaction. The e-learning tools selected to perform EduGene’s comparative evaluation are Moodle, Sakai, and ATutor. It is important to mention that the goal of the evaluation was only to highlight the benefits of EduGene as an educational app development tool.