Abstract:

The increasingly widespread use of mobile touchscreen devices for educational applications shows a rise in engagement and a beneficial effect on the learning process. This also allows students to access the learning content whenever convenient, and it can extend the learning materials to areas not covered in the official curriculums. This is facilitated by adopting educational applications that offer the learners a positive interaction with the learning material that enhances their motivation, and which clearly reflects their achievement. Additionally, these applications can provide students with feedback regarding their performance to enhance their desired behaviour. However, most educational applications rely on providing feedback only to evaluate students when they have right or wrong attempts ignoring offering students reinforcement feedback during wrong attempts.

In this paper, a touchscreen-based application that can be run on IOS and Android has been developed to help young students learn the Arabic alphabet. The Arabic Language has had limited coverage in research to date and has complex and varied orthography in its alphabet making Arabic Letters challenging for children to learn. The application adopted a gamification approach that utilizes game elements such as a progression bar and collecting badges beside the learning context. The application utilized a basic interaction method (drag, drop and clickable) to avoid complexity as the system is aimed at children. The system elements are guided with voice and pictures to enhance the interaction and allow children to understand the application despite their limited literacy level. Furthermore, the application adopted different feedback approaches such as immediate feedback, detailed feedback, and reinforcement feedback. These feedback approaches are supported by different multimedia such as sounds, images and animations.

A pilot study was conducted to evaluate the application with 15 native Arabic speakers aged between 6 to 9 and two Arabic language teachers. All of the students’ participants filled pre-questionnaire, were observed while interacting with the app, and completed a post-interview after using the app. Teachers were pre-interviewed and filled post questionnaire after reviewing the application. The result showed the system was effective in enhancing the comprehension of the Arabic letters with a high level of motivation. Also, both the application interaction devices and methods were suitable and appropriate for the young students. Additionally, teachers’ feedback on the application was positive in terms of the application's ability to facilitate the learning of the Arabic alphabet. They emphasized that the application offered the students a large range of letters and words with high usability.

Keywords:

m-learning, Gamification, Reinforcement, Language Learning.