Students at these schools use smartphones in classrooms and play with them too! But there are no complaints. In fact, they are being encouraged to do so because playing means learning here.
Sesame Workshop in India, in association with Qualcomm Wireless Reach, not only developed a set of Play N Learn games for children aged 5 to 8, but also conducted a study to analyse their impact on children’s learning.
The study has concluded that smartphones and tablet-based games indeed improve literacy and numeracy skills.
As many as 4500 students from Classes 1,2 and 3 and 40 children from the disadvantaged sections in Delhi and Bihar were introduced to 25 educative games in Hindi as part of their classroom learning and their attention, retention of concepts and overall performance were studied over a period of time (between 2013 and 2015).
In the 40-minute daily engagement, the digital games brought into the classroom lessons from Chamki, Googly, Grover, Elmo, Biscuit Baadshah, Boombah – all characters from Galli Galli Sim Sim , the Indian version of the Sesame Street. They learnt vocabulary, comprehension, identification of shapes, shadows, habitats, numbers, alphabets and spatial understanding. There were also games that focused on sanitation and hygiene.
The games were initially preloaded to smartphones/tablets and given to the schools and children from community. Later, they received 3G-enabled smartphones equipped with the games. “We took into consideration the findings of the ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) report while developing the games,” said Sashwati Banerjee, Managing Director, Sesame Workshop in India. ASER 2013 found that literacy and numeracy skills have declined in the past six years among children aged 5-16 studying in rural schools. The report also pointed to the lack of engaging content in classroom learning, she said.
There are thousands of games online, but not many are in Hindi, pointed out Anirban Mukerji, Senior Manager, Wireless Reach, Qualcomm, as the uniqueness of the Play N Learn games. “We also made it accessible to less-privileged children and ensured they were engaging and child-friendly,” he added.
