CHI 2009a: Designing Digital Games For Rural Children

SUMMARY:
     This article discusses how to design educational games for poor children in India.  The authors start out by explaining that some Western games are not understood by Indian children.  They observed Indian children playing four different Western games and found out that most of the children didn't immediately understand how to play these games.  To understand how to develop a game that Indian children better understand the authors looked at traditional Indian games.  They noted there are two main differences between Indian and western games.  First, most actions in traditional Indian games appeared to be atomic.  Second, players would usually have their own "turf", in which they are safe from harm.  To incorporate these ideas into video game, the authors came up with a game called Tree-Tree.  It is meant to help Indian children learn English words for fruit.  In the study most of the children grasped the concepts of the game immediately.  They gave fuzzy numbers at the end but between 25-50% of the children seemed to enjoy playing it.


Discussion:
     This paper was interesting to me because I didn't know rural Indian children had easy access to video games.  The paper mentions mobile games are most popular among them.  Educational games could be a great tool for helping India's poor people become more educated.  One fault of this work is that they don't mention how helpful the game was in helping the children learn.  They talk about proper use and enjoyment but never mention results on learning.  One possible work that could come from this study is an iphone game aimed at Indian children.