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October 21, 2009, 05:04 PM ET
In Rural India, Learning English via Cellphone
A project based at Carnegie Mellon University will study how effective games on cellphones are at teaching English to students in rural India.
Led by a professor at Carnegie Mellon, professors, graduate students and undergraduates have been working on developing games over the last six years. Now, because of financial support from Nokia, the professors will be able to lend 450 cellphones to children in villages in Andhra Pradesh, a region in the south of India. The children with games on the cellphones will be compared with children who will not play the games and will learn English in a traditional classroom setting.
"If it's very difficult for so-called poor children to go to school regularly. You could take mobile devices and make it possible to access learning anytime, anywhere," said Matthew Kam, assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon. Professors and students working on the project have been able to design games that match those played in the villages, Mr. Kam said, in order to make the games more attractive to students.
If the two-year study does show that students with the cellphones are able to improve their English, such projects could receive even more money from philanthropic organizations in the future, Mr. Kam added.
Learn more about the project here.
Comments
1. samueloulrey - October 21, 2009 at 06:02 pm
Harrumph! Based on watching US children playing Japanese video-games, I greatly doubt the efficacy. Sounds like a pretty lame grant. The money would be better invested allowing US citizens living in depressed socio-economic areas learn English by leaving that money in their own pockets, reducing zoning, building code, inspection, business licensing and other artificial interferences with bettering themselves.
2. emmadw - October 22, 2009 at 08:36 am
Not quite sure that I agree with the previous comment; video games designed for play & those for learning are often quite different.
I do agree that US (or, in my case) UK citizens can have v. limited access to learning & may benefit from ideas.
My concern would be not that it's a "lame grant", but more whether or not a mobile phone, with the requirement to charge it, need to pay to use it as a phone, potential attraction to theives etc., is necessarily the best platform to use.
Also, while mobile use is increasing in the majority world - are locally available phones capable of playing the games?
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