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

By Matthew Kam, Aishvarya Agarwal, Anuj Kumar, S. Lal, Akhil Mathur, A. Tewari, John F. Canny. Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems, 2008

329 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Education, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1e727d2a821373fe6b9317cdae04054082b6dc89

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Citations in the corpus

• A Tale of Cities: Urban Biases in Volunteered Geographic Information (2014, methodology): “The work that provided the initial inspiration for the study presented here is Gilbert et al.'s research on rural MySpace users (Gilbert, Karahalios, and Sandvig 2010; Gilbert, Karahalios, and Sandvig 2008).”
• The Evolution, Function, and Meaning of Marmot Alarm Communication (2007, background): “By meaning, I refer here specifically to their information content (Halliday, 1983; Macedonia and Evans, 1993).”