Abstract:

Videogames have taken an important role on children and adolescents through the recent years and gradually are used as a motivational tool to improve teaching and learning processes.

Particularly in Chile, thanks to the integration of ICT in the educational system, several tools like didactic presentation programs, virtual worlds or mobile apps facilitate the acquisition of the English as a second language.

One of the biggest issues within public education is the poor level of English vocabulary of graduated students, which directly affects their speaking, reading, listening and writing skills and even exceeds the basic level of international English evaluation tests such as KET, PET and TOEFL. Thus, continuous curricular adjustments have been made in teaching English since 1996 to provide students with tools that enable them to face the demands in today’s world. A good example is that English lessons are compulsory from 5th to 12th grade.

This research focuses on the development of a 2D videogame named Word-y, created using the program Construct2 in its free version. The aim of the videogame is to generate a friendly game-based environment to promote the learning process of English vocabulary according to specific units and contents. The aim is to describe the design of an educative videogame and to describe the validation process of the Word-y contents which are associated to learning vocabulary in English. The design has been developed using the incremental prototype model’ using the free version of Construct2 software. As projections, the future work implies improve the first prototype applying a content survey to 30 English teachers and educational informatics experts.

Keywords:

Gamification, Videogames, Second language, English.