In India, where English is one of two national languages — and used in 90 percent of the country’s indigenous Web content — English proficiency is critical for employment, upward mobility, and accessing technology. Yet English literacy remains out of reach for an estimated 160 million Indian children in rural areas and slums.
One answer? Cell phones. In India, cell phone use is exploding, even by the poor. By 2010, an estimated half-billion people in India will be using mobile phones.
Combining market opportunity with educational need, Berkeley computer sciences doctoral student Matthew Kam has been developing English language-learning games for cell phones, a project called Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies (MILLEE).
In field studies, Kam and other MILLEE team members discovered that getting kids interested in playing with cell phones was easy. Making the lessons effective, however, meant localizing content and game design, says Divya Ramachandran, a computer sciences Ph.D. student who participated in field studies in northern India.
To teach the concepts of “stop” and “go,” for example, the design team initially used green and red traffic lights. “The scenario was completely irrelevant,” says Ramachandran. “Many children haven’t driven in cars, and there aren’t traffic lights everywhere.” The solution was a picture of a traffic cop — still a common figure in India — using hand signals for stop and go.
So far MILLEE has focused on rural India, but the concept is applicable to other languages and developing regions. “It’s so satisfying,” says Ramachandran, “to use computers for public service, in the real world.”
