A TABLET-BASED PUZZLE GAME TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF CHILDREN’S ILLITERACY IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Information technologies have an active role in the educational field today. In developed countries, education is enriched by the contribution of Information Technology (IT) because personal computers (PC) can help learning. While at the same time, developing countries suffer from problems such as poor attendance rate at schools as well as poor literacy rate. A recent report by Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) states that children in developing countries are in a subordinate position. One of the reasons is that many students cannot attend school because of poverty even though the country has the compulsory education system. To solve this problem, many schools are established by NGO. Although these schools provide education and support to such children with difficulties, they have the problem of insufficient teachers. Therefore we planned to introduce tablet personal computers (TPC) in this school to solve the problem. These countries plan to introduce TPC because it is expected to give a hand to children in developing countries. The Indian government developed an inexpensive TPC for college students, which is called Akkash2. We used Akkash2 for elementary school students who had never operated TPC. Using TPC in the schools in developing countries is not as easy as that in developed countries since some problems are anticipated as follows. Because schools have no electric power, constructing Wi-Fi access point is not possible. In addition, inexpensive TPCs have limited functions. For example, the Bluetooth device is not equipped with Akkash2 and Wi-Fi Direct cannot be used even though Android 4.0 supports it. For these reasons, applications used in elementary schools with Akkash2 should be stand-alone.

As described above, improvement in literacy rate and educational standards is important factor in developing countries. To solve the problem of children’s illiteracy, we developed a tablet-based puzzle game to learn language. As a puzzle game does not need language skill, it is suitable for learning language. A puzzle game can also promote collaborate thinking among children. Our puzzle game runs in stand-alone but has the multi touch function so that more than one person can play the game at the same time. Pictures in the game depict Japanese culture and Indian culture. On completing the game, students would learn some Marathi, English and Japanese words. They can learn words in different languages with fun. We tested in this application in two NGO schools. In spite of their first use of TPCs, they became familiar with using them in about 10 minutes.

This paper enlightens the usefulness of the TPC in educational field in developing countries and the problem of introducing TPC in order to effectively deal with the problem of illiteracy.