MILLEE:Learning While Having Fun

Interview: Matthew Kam

Matthew Kam is completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science with a minor in Education at the University of California, Berkeley (USA). In January 2009, he will join the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Professor. The MILLEE Project grew out of his doctoral research focused on using programmable phones and educational computing to improve English language learning for children living in rural areas and urban slums in India. In the following interview, he describes the MILLEE Project’s goals, some of its research findings, and next steps.

What are the origins of the MILLEE Project?

The MILLEE Project emerged from my PhD thesis research. I was interested in how I could design educational software that could make a difference in the developing world. The project started in the summer of 2004, when I made a visit to India to see what the challenges on-the-ground were. We selected India because we were connected to an NGO in Uttar Pradesh – in northern India – that could host the kind of field studies we hoped to carry out.

India is a very interesting place to be doing this kind of work. There’s lots of optimism about what technology can do for social development. There are NGOs such as the Azim Premji Foundation that set up computer labs in rural schools and develop courseware on CD-ROM with the aim of helping kids in these schools learn better. We wanted to explore how we can extend educational opportunities through other technology platforms such as the cell phone. The government of India has a program called Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan to promote universal education. As part of this, they have a budget of $1.5 million per district for computer-assisted learning. Our hope is to gain support from the Indian government for MILLEE to take off in the long-term.

Why did you choose a learning approach based on mobile technology?

We looked at desktops, which require electricity and building space that can be padlocked for security. In rural India, almost half of school-age going children can’t go to school regularly. They need to work to help support their families. We needed to bring the school to them. The project’s value proposition was to make educational resources available where children could access them anywhere and anytime outside school. Cell phones offered the best potential solution.

How do MILLEE’s mobile games work?

We come at the project from two different angles: education and fun. From an educational perspective, we tried not to reinvent the wheel. We looked at 35 commercial, state-of-the-art language learning software and distilled the best practices that they employed. We then incorporated these best practices into the e-learning games that we designed. In the 2nd and 3rd year of the project, we started to observe post-test gains. One particular challenge was the time and energy it took us to explain our earlier games to the kids. The games were unconsciously Western in their designs and didn’t match the expectations and experiences that rural kids have about games. We therefore studied the traditional village games that they play every day, and designed our subsequent games based on these village games. This has made a big difference in making our game designs more intuitive.

The software is broken down into many screens. Some expose learners to different aspects of the English language – covering the spoken form or spelling of different words. We cover English at the word level and the sentence level. We cover sentence structures as well. We teach kids – mostly 8-to 14-year-olds – not only vocabulary, but how to form sentences and how to ask and answer questions using English. We expose learners to the language and test them on their understanding and recall.

Just recently, we concluded a three-month deployment. Even though the students came in having taken about 3-5 years of English classes on average, they nonetheless could not spell their names correctly in English. They attended our afterschool sessions for two hours, three times a week. At the end of the three months, we observed significant post-test gains.

What have been some of your greatest learnings?

We’ve learned a lot over the past four years and modified our approach accordingly. One interesting result relates to young people’s motivation. We came in with the mindset that the games needed to be fun in and of themselves. However, the kids enjoyed the games also because these games leveraged their social relationships within the village. In other words, kids took the screens that displayed their accomplishments in the games, and showed them to everyone. There was a “show off” effect. We’ll try to leverage these social relationships in our design in the future, so that we can better engage parents and community members in the learning process. I could imagine integrating an SMS feature that updates parents on how well their kids are learning.

What are your next steps?

In India, we hope to expand the work we started in the original pilot to the scale of 800 students in 20 rural schools. That will enable us to conduct a more credible evaluation on the learning benefits – or lack of – from cell phone-based language learning. We’re now talking to potential sponsors to provide cell phones and financial support for this phase. We’re also looking at how to expand the project in the U.S. Verizon gave us seed funding to see how we could target Spanish speaking immigrants in the U.S. This would start in the fall of 2008.

For further information, visit the MILLEE Project website.