Over the loud and excited classroom chatter of fifth-grade students in a small village in India, a teacher calls out the day’s lesson plan and distributes cell phones and headsets to the eager youngsters. The assignment: learn English literacy by playing educational game applications on Nokia cell phones.
The applications aim to improve English as a second language among poor children living in rural villages and urban slums in the developing world. The game applications were developed and piloted to 250 children in four low-income schools in India over the 2011-12 academic year by the research group of Matthew Kam, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute. The language-learning entertainment is modeled after traditional village games that rural children find familiar. One of the apps is an adaptation of the traditional village game called Tree-Tree, where the children navigate a maze of trees—collecting English letters—as they outrun a cartoon character chasing after them.
Teachers have noted an increase in the confidence level of children who participated in the technology-enhanced learning sessions. And children are learning English at an advanced rate as predicted by CMU’s MILLEE team (that stands for Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies).
The project has been named a 2012 Laureate in the Computerworld Honors Program. The annual award program honors visionary applications of information technology promoting positive social, economic, and educational change.
—Emmett Zitelli (HNZ’01)
Related Links:
Computerworld Honors HCII's MILLEE Project
