Designing e-learning games for rural children in India: a format for balancing learning with fun

  • Authors:

  • Matthew Kam;Aishvarya Agarwal;Anuj Kumar;Siddhartha Lal;Akhil Mathur;Anuj Tewari;John Canny

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Berkeley, CA;Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, Assam, India;Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India;Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India;Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India;Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India;University of California, Berkeley, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Designing interactive systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Poor literacy remains a barrier to economic empowerment in the developing world. Of particular importance is fluency in a widely spoken "world language" such as English, which is typically a second language for these low-income learners. We make the case that mobile games on cellphones is an appropriate solution in the typical ecologies of developing regions. The challenge is to design e-learning games that are both educational and pleasurable for our target learners, who have limited familiarity with high technology. We propose the receptive-practice-activation cycle that could be used as the conceptual model for the designs. We then report how this format could be refined, based on our experiences in the field with three games that have collectively undergone nine rounds of iterations. In particular, it appears that maintaining a distinction between learning and fun to some extent is necessary for effective designs.