Mobile Learning with Games in Rural India

W505 Mobile Learning
Stage 2 – 4: Mobile Technology Applied to Educational Games

Title: Mobile Games in Rural India

General information
Researchers in this study sought to evaluate game design patterns with the hope of informing future educational game designs that will be engaging and fun for students in rural areas of India. The need for English education in India is strong in rural communities and mobile education games designed for ESL could have a lot of potential for lowering the gap between the English levels of middle to upper class populations and the lower class populations. I was a bit disappointed to learn that no actual ESL educational games were used in this study.

Analysis

1. Learners
Learners in this study consisted of 241st and 2nd grade students in rural India aged 6-7 on average. These students received consent from parents and the school head to work with researchers for the first half of their school day and participated over 10 days. None of the students had prior experience with electronic games, though all knew what a cell-phone was.

2. Technology
A total of 9 i-mate SP5 Windows Mobile 5.0 smartphones were used in this study and most of the games employed utilized flashlite for programming.

3. Objectives
This study hoped to discover which design patterns, if any would be most effective for implementing in educational mobile games. The challenge comes in actually designing games that would be culturally appropriate, engaging, and fun for rural Indian children to play.

4. Games as Mobile Learning Components
How did the game play?
How did the mobile games work for achieving learning objectives?
A total of 8 games were used in this study with 3 games being designed especially for use incorporating supposedly effective design patterns. These games included:
Crocodile Rescue – where the player must rescue a drowning boy in a boat on a 2D map while distracting crocodiles.
Dancer - where the player moves around an audience throwing tomatoes at dancers on a stage. This allows the user to assume the identity of trouble-maker, which might not be possible in real life.
Train Tracks – Lets the student use self expression to design a train track course around obstacles.

Including these games, 2 games were designed by amateurs and purchased for use in the study. Three more games were professionally made and purchased off the shelf. It was the authors’ hypothesis that the games designed with specific design patterns in mind would be more popular among students than other types.

In actuality, none of the top three popular games utilized design patters and one of the three most popular games was designed by an amateur. Researchers go on to analyze possible reasons for their results and acknowledge the need for games to be culturally appropriate for a target group in order for them to be popular and effective.

5. Pedagogical underpinnings

Researchers found that easy fun games rather than hard fun games appealed to this user group the most. Easy fun games mean that the games can simply be played for the enjoyment of playing whereas hard fun games implement goals and challenging time constraints. These findings are in keeping with Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development in that games and other learning tasks should neither be too difficult or too easy for participants. Instead, they should fall somewhere within the ZPD wherein participants can reach higher performances with some assistance from an outside source such as an adult, a more experienced learner, or from instructions and assistance found in the game itself.

Additionally, one of the most popular games allowed users to alter the aesthetically pleasing feature of a game. Researchers acknowledged that aesthetics are important and likely appeal to visual learners, though aesthetics alone will not likely warrant any game’s popularity. Instead, the whole of a game should be greater than the sum of its parts.