Some Intricacies in m4Ed4Dev:The Human Development Lab’s Ongoing Experiences from India

Matthew Kam, PhDAssistant ProfessorCarnegie Mellon University

August 18, 2011USAID 1st Annual Mobiles 4 Education 4 Development Symposium

Needs and Problem Statement

• Fluency in “power language”e.g. English

• Public schools in developingregions (e.g. India) are not succeeding

• 101 million primary school-age children do not attend school– 36 million in South-Asia

– 39 million in Sub-Saharan Africa

Major Milestones

• 2004-07: exploratory studies +formative testing

• 2008: semester-length pilot (after-school program)

• 2009: semester-length pilot (everyday, rural settings)

• 2010: design + develop second generation of games

• 2011: semester-length pilot with 254 children in 4 low-fee private schools

Traditional Village Games[in ACM CHI 2009 – Best Paper Honorable Mention]

• How are traditional Indian village games different from existing Western videogames?

• Compared game elements against 296 game design patterns documented in Bjork and Holopainen 2005

Learning Benefits: Post-Test Gains

• Significant post-test gains (n=24, p = 0.007)

All learners High-gains learners

Low-gains learners

Pre-test score

0.29 0.41 0.19

Post-test gains

0.18 0.390000000000001

0.0800000000000002

5%

15%

25%

35%

45%

55%

65%

75%

85%

Score

(norm

alized s

cale

)

• Low-gains learners (n=15) > high-gains learners (n=9)

Learning Benefits: Vocab Coverage

• Average participant covered 46 new words over 16 weeks of unsupervised usage of cellphones

– At this rate, each participant is expected to learn 150 new words in a calendar year

– Benchmark is 500 words in “First World” learning conditions

Electricity was Major Bottleneck

• Despite electricity challenges, participants were able to keep cellphones charged for mobile learning

– 2 hours, 23 min per week (on average)

Electricity generatorat home

Reliable power outlets at home

Unreliable power outlets at home

Locations of Cellphone Use

• Unexpectedly, most learning via cellphones occurred at home (vs. outdoors)

• Home is cooler than outdoors due to summer heat

• Participants self-reported taking cellphones outdoor prior to summer

• Concern about loss of phone

* % of total time spent at a particular location

Gender and Caste Equity Issues[in ACM CHI 2010 – Best Paper Honorable Mention]

• 6 swollen batteries

Ongoing R&D• Extend bridge curriculum beyond ½ academic year

– Targets rural children, who lag three years behind urban, middle-class counterparts

– Differs from existing commercial software for industrialized world children; targets foundational knowledge that good schools would have provided

• Pilot with >254 children in 4 low-fee private schools to co-evolve sustainable m4Ed4Dev educational models

– Possibilities for teacher training

Acknowledgements• Carnegie Mellon University (USA) – Rafae Aziz, Ryan Baker, Rachita Chandra, Manoj

Dayaram, Maxine Eskenazi, Ayan Kishore, Alex Kowalski, Anuj Kumar, Derek Lomas, Gino Mancuso, Andrew Ngan, Pooja Reddy, Daniel Rhim, Geeta Shroff, Kyle Sondrock, Raja Sooriamurthi, Le Wei, Sue-mei Wu

• Chinese Academy of Sciences (China) – Lv Fei, Tian Feng , Ben Rachbach

• DAIICT, IIT, IIIT, NSIT (India) – Aishvarya Agarwal, Lalit Agarwal, Shilpan Bhagat, Malav Bhavsar, Anshul Chaurasia, Akash Gangil, Denny George, Aakriti Gupta, Chetan Gupta, Mayank Gupta, Amol Jain, Ashwin Jain, Rachit Jain, Siddharth Kothari, Kaustav Kundu, Siddhartha Lal, Manish Lohani, Mohit Maheshwari, Nikhil Marathe, Akhil Mathur, Kishan Patel, Vipul Raheja, Dhruv Shah, Yash Soni, Surendra Survi, Satyajit Swain, Vivek Tripathi, Pallav Vyas

• University of Berkeley (USA) – Ruth Alexander, Lauren Bailey, Eric Brewer, John Canny, Deepti Chittamuru, Jane Chiu, Varun Devanathan, Asya Grigorieva, Dimas Guardado, Christopher Hom, Glynda Hull, Anjali Koppal, Maksim Lirov, Aaron McKee, Gary Miguel, David Nguyen, Anand Raghavan, Divya Ramachandran, Priyanka Reddy, Vijay Rudraraju, Monish Subherwal, Simon Tan, Anuj Tewari, Jingtao Wang

• University of Nairobi (Kenya) – Tonny Omwansa

• Pilot team (India) – Mehnaaz Abidi, Shabnam Aggarwal, Aman Anand, Siddharth Bhagwani, Jatin Chaudhary, Sonal Gupta, Shirley Jain, Alok Prakash, Neelima Purwar, Rolly Seth, Gautam Singh, Kartikey Singh, Kavish Sinha, Indrani Vedula

Contact Info

Matthew Kam, PhDAssistant ProfessorCarnegie Mellon UniversityHuman-Computer Interaction InstituteEmail: mattkam@cs.cmu.eduHomepage: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mattkam

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