Educational Math Games For Developing Countries

Hundreds of millions of children in developing countries are unable to complete primary education. Mobile devices such as tablets are increasingly inexpensive and becoming accessible in large numbers in such developing countries. We propose developing educational software for such tablets to help children acquire arithmetic skills. To do this, we will develop new ways of gamifying math operations, to apply the principle that says that the gameplay in educational games should have users perform the very skill that they are meant to develop. To do this, we propose breaking down math operations into small steps, each of which can be performed with gestures or with textual input, with appropriate feedback at each step to guide or confirm the users actions. We will design and prototype such gamifications in software for mobile devices and evaluate them with primary school students. Beyond this initial project, in the future, we hope to pursue field evaluations with students in India.

Faculty Supervisor:

Michael McGuffin

Student:

Etienne Phelip

Partner:

Datawind

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

Program: