[lg policy] In Rural India, Learning English via Cellphone

[Harold Schiffman]

In Rural India, Learning English via Cellphone
By Simmi Aujla

A project based at Carnegie Mellon University will study how effective
games on cellphones are at teaching English to students in rural
India. Led by a professor at Carnegie Mellon, professors, graduate
students and undergraduates have been working on developing games over
the last six years. Now, because of financial support from Nokia, the
professors will be able to lend 450 cellphones to children in villages
in Andhra Pradesh, a region in the south of India. The children with
games on the cellphones will be compared with children who will not
play the games and will learn English in a traditional classroom
setting.

"If it's very difficult for so-called poor children to go to school
regularly. You could take mobile devices and make it possible to
access learning anytime, anywhere," said Matthew Kam, assistant
professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie
Mellon. Professors and students working on the project have been able
to design games that match those played in the villages, Mr. Kam said,
in order to make the games more attractive to students. If the
two-year study does show that students with the cellphones are able to
improve their English, such projects could receive even more money
from philanthropic organizations in the future, Mr. Kam added.

Learn more about the project here. http://www.millee.org/



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