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The Serious Game: weMakeWords
From Developer Perspective and from Psychological Perspective
Ruth Demmel
Technische Universit¨
at M¨
unchen
demmel@in.tum.de
Barbara K¨
ohler
Technische Universit¨
at M¨
unchen
koehlerb@in.tum.de
Stephan Krusche
Technische Universit¨
at M¨
unchen
krusche@in.tum.de
Ludwig Schubert
Technische Universit¨
at M¨
unchen
ludwig.schubert@in.tum.de
Abstract
We suggest digital serious games as a means to create in-
dividualized learning environments that train social skills in
parallel to the content. In cooperation with a child psychol-
ogy practice we developed the collaborative and adaptive se-
rious game weMakeWords as a prove of concept. The game
teaches children how to read in a fun and approachable way,
while adjusting itself to the children’s need. In first prelimi-
nary evaluations the concept has been highly successful con-
cerning the leaning outcome as well as in fostering collabo-
ration between children.
Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.1. [Computers in
Education]: Collaborative Learning
General Terms Design, Human Factors
Keywords Serious Game, Learning, Preschool
1. Introduction
Learning is an extremely important part in today’s Knowl-
edge Economy. But not only learning content but also dif-
ferent soft skills, e. g. collaboration is crucial. Practicing
under a personal tutor would be the ideal learning environ-
ment [1][4], but is neither affordable nor feasible. Instead we
suggest using digital Serious Games utilizing different algo-
rithms in artificial intelligence to reach a similarly effective
learning experience. As a proof of concept we present we-
MakeWords a collaborative and adaptive serious game that
helps children to practice their reading skills.
2. The Game
weMakeWords is a collaborative and adaptive serious game
that helps children to learn reading. It is developed at the
Technical University Munich together with a child psychol-
ogy practice. Children collaborate in playing motivating sto-
ries like saving animals that escaped from the zoo into a
dangerous city. They combine alphabetical words or Chinese
ideographs out of individual letters or symbol components
and are thus familiarized with German, English or Chinese.
Figure 1. In weMakeWords children spell the word on top,
assisted by a watermark.
They also gain social competencies as the game only
continues with the next round if all teammates fully built up
their words. This immediately leads to communication needs
between smarter and weaker children. To help each other
they can send letters to teammates and ask for support when
having difficulties. This behavior of the game also reduces
frustration and encourages the cooperativeness.
Figure 2. Cooperation is crucial. Whenever I do not need a
stroke I should send it to my teammates to help them.
3. Adaptivity
weMakeWords automatically adapts to the playing children.
We do this on three different levels.
First the word or symbol we present is selected to be-
come increasingly difficult with each correct answer. By this
means we try to avoid boredom while at the same time give
each child enough time to repeat when necessary. At the be-
ginning we use estimations for the difficulty of each word
given by the child psychologist. As the child plays this es-
timate is corrected so that words where the child seems to
have problems are ranked as more difficult.
Second we hand the child different letters or strokes de-
pendent on the current performance. If a child is making
many mistakes in a row the number of letters or strokes that
are needed for its word is highly increased so that it will
eventually solve it even by guessing. This mechanism is pri-
marily used to prevent frustration when playing alone.
Third we provide different amounts of scaffolding through
a watermark. This watermark is shown below the position
where the child is supposed to drag the correct letters or
strokes. It dynamically changes its opacity according to the
child’s skill with the particular word or symbol.
4. Results
An evaluation with children aged between 4 and 8 years was
conducted [2] to find out whether children understood the
game and were able to learn with it. For this the Chinese
version was used in order to avoid the need of evaluating
previous knowledge.
All children were able to play the game after a short
explanation from a supervisor. After playing the game for 15
to 30 minutes children remembered on average four Chinese
symbols and their meanings. Many of the children were
even able to draw them although the game does not directly
practice this.
5. Conclusion and Future Work
In this paper we introduced weMakeWords as a serious game
that does not only teach reading but also supports the devel-
opment of social skills. Our preliminary evaluation of we-
MakeWords indicates that the presented approach is very
promising. The game is now available on the App Store [3].
In the future improvements and more detailed evaluation of
the adaptivity should be made to further improve the game.
Also we want to research whether similar game concepts can
be expanded to other topics and target groups.
References
[1] B. Bloom. The 2 sigma problem: The search for methods of
group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring. Educa-
tional researcher, pages 4–16, 1984.
[2] D. Ismailovi´
c, D. Pagano, and B. Br¨
ugge. wemakewords-an
adaptive and collaborative serious game for literacy acquisition.
In IADIS International Conference-Game and Entertainment,
2011.
[3] S. Krusche. wemakewords, 2011. www.wemakewords.com.
[4] K. VanLehn, C. Lnch, K. Schulze, J. A. Shapiro, R. Shelby,
L. Taylor, D. Treacy, A. Weinstein, and M. Wintersgill. The
andes physics tutoring system: Five years of evaluations. Tech-
nical report, DTIC Document, 2005.
