dc.description.abstract | Rare diseases affect patients’ quality of their daily life. For example, people with achondroplasia (i.e., little people) need to face a lot of difficulties in their daily life due to their small bodies. Nevertheless, the symptoms of the little people are not so serious as those of people with other rare diseases. Thus, the little people are still able to look after themselves if proper training is provided for them. On the other hand, the little people with young ages need to be attended by their family. Thus, the little people’s family also need sufficient information so that they can know how to take care of the little people. To this end, this study developed online encyclopedias with multimedia technologies and digital games to help the little people and their family solve problems that they met in their daily life. More specifically, the multimedia technologies provide multiple types of information to sort out problems about little people’s daily life. On the other hand, digital games emphasize on interactivity and entertainment that people can experience when they solve problems related to little people’s daily life. However, the little people and their family play different roles. The little people play as patients while their families are caregivers. In other words, the little people and their families may have different reactions to these two online encyclopedias. To this end, this study aims to investigate how the little people and their family react to the online multimedia encyclopedia (OME) and online game-based encyclopedia (OGBE), in terms of learning behavior, learning motivation and learning perception.
Regarding the results from the OME, the family had better learning motivation than the little people. Furthermore, the little people preferred to use the search mechanism to locate specific information about little people’s daily life while their family preferred to find more information about little people’s daily life. In addition, the little people were concerned with their professional development while the family needs more information about medical care.
Regarding the results from the OGBE, the little people and their family demonstrated similar reactions, in terms of learning motivation and perception, but they had different reactions to the background music. The little people thought that the background music was enjoyable whereas the family indicated that the background music distracted their thinking. Finally, two frameworks are produced based on the results obtained from these two online encyclopedias. These frameworks can be applied to help learners, researchers, and designers to promote the developments of other online encyclopedias for rare diseases. | en_US |