Game-based learning: educational game Azbuka to help young children learn writing Cyrillic letters

Abstract

A working prototype for a mobile application called Azbuka is presented in this paper. The application is developed in a form of interactive educational game for mobile touch screen devices and is intended to help young children to learn writing Cyrillic letters. An important challenge during the research was the design of the graphical user interface (GUI) and game logic that should be acceptable, intuitive and easy to use for the target users i.e. children without previous training or technological experience. In order to investigate the application’s acceptance and its impact on children motivation for learning, the Azbuka application was evaluated in a real case scenario on a selected set of test users. The study results revealed that the children are highly motivated to learn writing Cyrillic using new technologies, which are quickly accepted and adopted.