MobileActive.org

At MobileActive, we’ve held a bi-weekly Research Ignite series to keep up with the latest in research related to mobiles for development. For the past few weeks, our team has been learning and discussing new research and reports. We invite you to put on your learning caps and plug into our screencasts, where we will feature some exciting developments in the world of m4d.

For this Ignite, we’re featuring three studies that were presented at the 28th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The research covers mobile games in rural India and China that address literacy, and a study on mobile Internet use in South Africa.

mGames for Literacy and Mobile Internet - Research Ignite #1 from MobileActive.org on Vimeo.

Practice Chinese Strokes and Learn Characters

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of California, Carnegie Mellon University and Nokia Research Palo Alto developed two mobile games, Multimedia Word and Drumming Stroke, which aim to help young children in rural China recognize Chinese characters and practice strokes. It is the first known m-game that leverages a mobile learning tool for the Chinese language.

A Mobile Marakothi, a Traditional Children’s Game in India, that Teaches English

In rural India, empirical studies show that children often miss school largely due to family labor, assisting in domestic work at home or in the farm without wages or as hired labor. The authors believe that “Mobile learning can empower poor children to balance their educational and income earning goals,” and so, pursued the development of a mobile game to teach English vocabulary. Mobile phones with the m-game were deployed to children living in rural Uttar Pradesh, India for 26 weeks. The pilot identified opportunities for out-of-school learning, revealed gender influences on m-game usage and surprisingly, showed that m-games traversed caste and village boundaries and facilitated social interaction.

Presentation starts at 4:03 min.

Challenging Assumptions of Mobile Internet Access: The Experience of Women in A Township in South Africa

More and more mobile users are surfing the internet on their phones. For most people in developing countries, there is no plan B – in other words, no PC-based internet access. This study reports the experience of a group of women in Khayelitsha, in Cape Town, South Africa who connected to a mobile-based internet for the first time. In this article, six challenges facing mobile-only internet users in developing countries are identified. The authors propose how to the mobile industry can move forward by keeping the end-users in mind and introduce the concept of “digital divide” that is secondary to mobile access – it’s “after-access”.

Presentation starts at 9:59 min.

Thank you to the authors for providing permission to use images, screenshots and data as well as helpful feedback for the screencast. For more research, reports, and white papers about mobile technology for social change visit our mdirectory.

Full citations:

Tian, F., Lv, F., Wang, J., Wang, H., Luo, W., Kam, M., Setlur, V., Dai, G., and Canny, J. (2010). Let's Play Chinese Characters: Mobile Learning Approaches via Culturally Inspired Group Games. Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (CHI 2010) (pp.1603-1612). New York: ACM. Archival http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1753326.1753565. 

Kumar, A., Tewari, A., Shroff, G., Chittamuru, D., Kam, M., and Canny, J. (2010). An Exploratory Study on Unsupervised Mobile Learning in Rural India. Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (CHI 2010). (pp. 743-752). New York: ACM. Archival http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1753326.1753435.

Gitau, Shikoh, Marsden, Gary, & Donner, Jonathan. (2010). After access - Challenges facing mobile-only internet users in the developing world. Proceedings of the 28th international conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI 2010). (pp.2603-2606). New York: ACM. Archival http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1753326-1753720.   

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