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Developing Didactic Game for Ethnic Children

Rodna Marrufo Segura

Facultad de Matemáticas UADYMérida, Yucatán, MéxicoEmail rodna_adnay@hotmail.com

Berenice Morales Pisté

Facultad de Matemáticas UADYMérida, Yucatán, MéxicoEmail bere_gema14@hotmail.com

Levy Juarez Dorantes

Facultad de Matemáticas UADYMérida, Yucatán, MéxicoEmail levi_ulises@hotmail.com

Rodrigo Fernández Novelo

Facultad de Matemáticas UADYMérida, Yucatán, MéxicoEmail rodrigofdz@gmail.com

Abstract

Nowadays exists a wide range of educational tools such as encyclopedias and interactive me- dia. Had a major impact on the learning process of the kids. But most of these tools aren’t avaible for all kind of people due economic factors or the tool aims for another cultural group. In Mexico the education has become a social problem according to the INEGI[1] 53% of a population in range between 14 to 18 years old do not assist to school anymore due economic problem or lack of preparation on their early years at elementary school. Knowing this we develop an education tool to help Mayan communities in Mexico especially children through didactics games which can help them to complement their education and getting a better Spanish. The main on this article is to show the process in how we develop this tool an ethnic group.

Keywords

INEGI :

Instituto nacional de estadística y geografía.(National center of statistics and geography)

CCA:

Centro comunitario de aprendizaje(Learning community center)

DGEI:

Dirección General de Educación Indígena

(General direction of indigene education)

INTRODUCTION

The actual educational tools are wining the battleagainst the traditional ways of teaching because it isway more dynamic and entertainment than stay andlisten a professor 4 hours nonstop. Behind all of thiseducational tools or a computer general interface aretechniques of new and raising discipline called humancomputer interaction or HCI and adding an user center design deliver a powerful new ways of interactionthat’s why we base our develop in this two disciplines.The development process was for about 4 months wedived the process in four of steps:

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Choosing he project

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Requirements

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Development

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TestingThese were the process that we been through the entiredevelopment process.

The Team

We are currently students taking the third semester inthe Faculty of mathematics of UADY this paper it isfor a HCI class.

1-Choosing the Project

The development takes place in Mérida Yucatan. Yu-catan has a big speaking Mayan population communit-ies outside the city have shown in the Figure1.

Figure 1. Mayan speaking people density INEGI.

After watching the data of the people in Yucatanwhom speak Mayan we push ourselves to work andchoose some project related to this community. One of the author of this paper Berenice proposes to create adidactic tool to improve the Spanish of the children of Mayan communities who already in school in a rangeof age between 7 – 8 years old. We present our idea tothe professor and it was accepted. So we begun to point out the important that this project could and the benefits from it.

Social Relevance

Thinking in just the fact of helping communities whoare constantly forgotten by the government only be-cause they speak a different language or fail in school because they never had the same preparation level, anddenied them tools to help them to improve their learn-ing just because language barriers it seems unacceptedable for us. And motivated and encourage us to work with this issue even is just a little help, it has an important social relevance.

Factibility

One of the many question we had consider was howfactible the project was, as mentioned before we sawthe that population was big and according to DGEI[2]has for about 645 indigene schools and every townoutside the city has a CCA which is open for all thecommunity to learn how to use a computer or accessinformation and is regular use by the school to take thestudents there. This information was what we lookingfor this gave and idea of what are we working on.

The plan

The next step on the process was to create a work pro-gram, we set dates to take the process in order to avoid problems that could be found, we manage to take the process very well as we use software engineer tech-niques to recollect requisites.

2-.Requirements

The first step on making requisites was to create ideasof how we want to application behave and what are themains functionality of the project to do this we use aan affinity diagram in class and it gave us clearly ideaof what we want the project to be.The second step on this stage was to identify the mainusers of the application that we trying to create, weidentify three main characters who can use the applica-tion and classified them:On primary secondary and tertiary user.

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Primary user.

The children

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Secondary user.The admin of the CCA.

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Tertiary user.The parent related to the children.Once we already identify and classified our user westarted to creating persona scenarios and users pro-files.This is the user profile a persona and scenario of themain user.User Profile.Age: 7-8 years old.Gender: female or male.Location: Mostly outside the city.Social-economic Status: low income.Education: Elementary School.Computer experience: none or basic experience.Specific product experience: They have experiencewith some related interfaces(games).Technology available: In their communities centersthey can find these computers.Attitudes and values: some of them fear of technology,they mostly are willing to learn.Learning style: Visual learners(through didacticgames)Persona Name: Pedro Pech May.Age: 7 years old.Type of user: Primary User.Disabilities: he can’t fully speak Spanish.Location: Kinchil, Yucatan.Skill set: he speaks a fluent Mayan, he has a basicknowledge using a PC and Spanish, and he can readand write.Hobbies: Playing with his friends, reading.Goals: getting good grades at school be a doctor.Pedro is a normal kid who enjoys playing all the timewith he also loves to read and helping his friends doingtheir homework. He enjoys playing with games whohad cards involve, one of is favorites games it is calledLoteria(Bingo) but he recently found out that in hiscommunity center a new type of PC games that he canuse to learn new words from it in Spanish with his fa-vorite games, he was so excited at moment that he ranout to tell her parents and friends the new type of games that he is gonna use at this center.ScenarioOne day Pedro told to his parents that he was having problems with some of the Spanish words , so Pedro’s parents talk to his professor and he told them that thecommunity center is waiting for a new type of di-dactics computer games that Pedro can used to expandhis vocabulary and knowledge he just to wait until ar-rive. One week later Pedro was randomly walking onthe street when he was told by his friend Jorge that anew type of Pc games arrived in their community cen-ter , so they went to ask what exactly is this gameabout, when they arrived they were assigned to a computer, Pedro already know how to use a computer ,Jorge’s skills are null so he needs to be assisted, Pedrorun the program and he saw that he can choose between Mayan interface or Spanish interface, he alsosaw a brief tutorial how to play these mini-games, sohe start to play the memorama mini game he realize thegames is different from the game original memoramahe actually can relate the Spanish words and incorpor-ate into his vocabulary, he was quickly expanding hisvocabulary, he found that if he make a correct move-ment he’s gonna to be reward by the interface. after playing 30 minutes he discover that as he advance inthe game the words became more complex so he savehis advance after doing this he look up for other games, he enjoy the reward system and the figures inthe games after 1 hour of playing he had to give his place to another kid so he close the program and left.We recollect our data through Open interviews Closedended surveys and observation, we choose this meth-ods because it was best option for the group that wewere taking information.