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Geography educational gaming system for mobile devices

Abstract:

Our proposal is a geography educational gaming application aimed to mobile devices. More in depth, it is a game that instructs users in the learning of geography. It helps to exercise the users' memory, produces an enhancement in the user geography knowledge and lead to these benefits trough exercises that are interesting and challenging, in the boundaries between gaming and studding. The game we present can be considered as a brain training game but we shall avoid the use of this name in particular because of its commercial implications. These kind of games are meant for casual gaming, when the users have time to spare, like when travelling on train or bus, on breaks during work, and such. On top of that, certain studies have proved that regular play of brain challenging games can contribute to brain health. Just like a muscle can keep fit when it's used regularly, brain can be also kept health by performing simple exercises, just like our game does, also including the additional benefit of knowledge increase and versatility and interesting contents. The type of game is not complicated to play at all. A map is given to the user, as well as the name of a country, or the name of a country capital, and it will invite the user to click on the map in the place where they think the actual country is. This game is easily upgradeable; a option is given to the user to download new maps, and new types of questions. For instance, instead of supplying the name of a capital to the user, it can show the name of an historic event, or the name of a famous person, then the user should click on the place where the event took place, or the person was birth. In order to do this, a distribution platform was also created. This platform allows user to download learning contents like games, manuals, updates for such games, etc. This platform adapts itself to the device characteristics, so users can only download suitable content for their phones, pdas, etc, which are part of what is known as ubiquitous communication (Nyiri, 2002). Our work is part of the TIFYC research group works at the Computer Science Department of the Alcala University. We focus on e-learning and ubiquitous computing. Also, one of the main research areas, m-learning (also known as mobile learning), surge from the joint of these two research fields and comprises the work we are presenting.