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Informatica 38 (2014) 241–248 241
A Cognitonics Approach to Computer Supported Learning in the
Mexican State of Oaxaca
Paul Craig
Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, China
E-mail: p.craig@xjtlu.edu.cn, paulspapers.com
Néna Roa-Seïler
Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Universidad Tecnológica de la Mixteca, Huajuapan de León, Oaxaca, México
E-mail: n.roa-seiler@napier.ac.uk
Marcela Martínez Díaz
Universidad Tecnológica de la Mixteca, Huajuapan de León, Oaxaca, México
E-mail: mtz.diaz.marce@gmail.com
Felipe Lara Rosano
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad de México, Distrito Feder, México
E-mail: flararosano@gmail.com
Keywords: cognitonics, human computer interaction, educational videogames, collaborative learning
Received: July 27, 2014
Cognitonics is a new science which looks at ways to reconcile human socio-spiritual development with
increasingly rapid human intellectual development in the new context of technological advances and
increased cultural homogeny. This is particularly relevant in areas such as education and informatics
where children are found to be increasingly capable to control and adapt to new technological advances
yet often suffer from a lack of social development or are unable to engage with aspects of their own
cultural heritage. In this study we consider the application of a cognitonics based approach to the
problems of the Oaxacan education system, particularly for indigenous children who suffer from a loss
of culture and diminished provision of education due to a lack of resources and regular teacher strikes.
Specifically, we look at how the introduction of face-to-face collaborative video games can help develop
academic, information-technology and social skills together while promoting spiritual well-being and
cultural identity.
Povzetek: Predstavljena je kognitonska metoda učenja v mehiški državi Oaxaca.
1 Introduction
Oaxaca State is located in the south west of Mexico
bordering Puebla and Veracruz to the north, Guerrero
and Chiapas to the East and West, with the Pacific Ocean
to the south. The overall population is around 3.5 million
with about a third of the population speaking one of
sixteen formally recognised indigenous languages.
Around half of these do not speak Spanish and the
remaining two-thirds of the population are predominantly
mixed or indigenous peoples who have lost their
language. The rugged terrain and linguistic or cultural
differences mean that people often live in small secluded
communities. Many of these communities suffer from
limited access to services and employment opportunities.
Overall, 53% of the population live in rural areas [1] and
67.2% live in poverty [2]. 60% of the population are
under 30 and more than a third of the total population are
enrolled in the educational system. Around 700,000 of
these are children in primary education [3].
Despite their rich cultural heritage and the resilience
of Oaxacan people to general hardship, they are currently
faced with a number of serious social and economic
challenges. Primary education is particularly problematic
with Mixtec municipalities accounting for the majority of
the 80% in Oaxaca not adhering to minimum
requirements set by the Mexican government [4]. Only
5% of indigenous persons in the state attain a grade
beyond primary school level and over 21% of the overall
state population is illiterate [4]. These problems can be
attributed to a number of factors including low family
income [5], disruption of family structures due to high
rates of migration [4, 5] and the large percentage of the
population that live in remote rural areas [6]. There is
also the significant problem that many indigenous
teachers have not received formal training [7] and a
strong sense that the education system is not properly
adapted to best serve the indigenous population.
242 Informatica 38 (2014) 241–248 P. Craig et al.
Most of these social, economic and political
problems have their roots in, and are exacerbated by,
corruption, which is endemic in Mexico as a whole [8].
Corruption at the fundamental level is the illegitimate use
of public power to benefit private interest. This is when
individuals expect illicit payback for services or
preferential treatment. While this occurs on different
levels with different grades of severity, the result is that
people are denied access to opportunities and official
structures fail to function in an efficient or just manner.
This leads to inequality that leads to frustration, social
unrest and criminal activity.
A lack of altruistic community spirit [9] or, at a very
basic level, a lack of common compassion is at the root
of corruption. A tendency toward corrupt behaviour is
not however a natural attribute of the Mexican people but
rather a result of the social conditions such as economic
hardship and marginalization caused by factors such as
the large scale migration of people to urban areas and the
subsequent loss of established community structures.
Our proposal for working toward a partial solution to
this problem is to support the provision of innovative
education methods such as collaborative learning.
Collaborative learning is where two or more students
learn together by working on the same problem. This
allows the students to learn through shared experience
and face-to-face interaction, in effect capitalising on the
inherent social nature of learning [10]. Many of the
attributes promoted by collaborative learning are
important for promoting community spirit and tackling
the root causes of corruption. Important aspects of
collaborative learning are positive interdependence,
individual accountability, face-to-face promotive
interaction, social skills and group processing (or self-
analysis of the group) [11]. Our hope is that by
developing these abilities at an early age, when young
people begin to define themselves as individuals and
develop intellectually, we can help avoid the
development of the converse negative traits later in life.
Specifically, we look at how collaborative
educational videogames can be used to help primary
school children develop collaborative and proper social
skills while achieving learning objectives that would
normally be taught in a traditional classroom
environment. This combines the teaching of the
classroom syllabus with an introduction to information-
technology and the development of essential social skills
so as to balance the development of the intellectual and
socio-spiritual sides of the student in accordance with the
philosophy of cognitonics [12].
2 Related work
Cognitonics aims, in particular, to help people adapt to
and use technology by improving cognitive mechanisms
of processing information and developing the emotional
sphere of the personality [12-14]. Examples of
cognitonics in education are the use of broadband tele-
conferencing to allow young people to interface with
public figures [15], using technology for the self-
evaluation of history lessons [16] and building a mental
model of student online activity in an online e-learning
environment [17]. Collaborative face-to-face videogames
also fall within the scope of cognitonics, since they aim
to promote a more sociable and culturally relevant
learning experience [18-20]. While the concept of using
collaborative videogames for cognitonics is a relatively
new development, there is a long history of technology
being used in Mexican education and in many regards
collaborative games can be seen as a logical progression
from these technologies.
2.1 Distance learning
Over the years various Mexican governments have
recognized the problems of delivering education in
remote and marginalized areas and sought to remedy
these problems through the application of technology
[21]. The most successful programs have been in the area
of distance learning [22] supported by television
networks and courses delivered through the mail.
Computer based learning has been somewhat less
successful due to problems of IT infrastructure and the
cost of equipment.
In the late nineties Ernesto Zedillo introduced a
program of Distance Education aimed at bringing quality
education to remote areas without the necessity for
students to relocate or travel large distances to attend
classes. Since then, three distinct projects have been put
into place to provide Distance Learning in Mexico. These
are the Educational Satellite Television Network
(EDUSAT) [23] which provides support for the training
and development of teachers, the Red Escolar (Scholar
Network) [24] which provides education in information
technologies and Telesecundaria (Tele-secondary school)
[25] providing general and technical secondary
education.
The provision of computer based distance learning
material is limited in Mexico and its usefulness is
questionable as very few Mexicans stand to benefit from
this type of education in its traditional form.
Traditionally, computer based distance learning means
learning at home and few Mexicans have a suitable
computer at home. According to the INEG, as of 2006,
only 58.7% of the population have access to a personal
computer with only 45% having access to the internet
[26]. These figures are likely to be a lot worse for less
advantaged sections of the population who stand to
benefit the most from distance learning programmes.
2.2 Computer based distance learning
Enciclomedia [27] is the Mexican governments most
committed effort in the area of computer based distance
learning to date. This was released in the 1990s,
incorporating videos, text, virtual visits, sounds and
images to complement free textbooks. Later versions of
the service incorporated content from Encarta [28]
provided by Microsoft and integrated resources, activities
and audiovisuals generated by projects such as the Red
Escolar [24], Biblioteca Digital, Sec 21 and Sepiensa
[29]. However, the project was not generally considered
a success. Teachers found the material to be inconsistent
A Cognitonics Approach to Computer Supported Learning in… Informatica 38 (2014) 241–248 243
and, according to primary teachers in the nation capital,
the program ceased to be used altogether from the 2010
when as part of the Basic Education Reform the content
free textbook was changed without the program being
updated [30].
Other private initiatives tended to concentrate on the
provision of computer equipment in the classroom. In
2009, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim donated 50,000
laptops for use in Mexican schools from the One Laptop
per Child (OLPC) program [31]. Kids on Computers [32]
is another important program, working in Oaxaca to
recycle used computers for use in rural schools. A
general criticism of these types of program is that they
can do little to serve the immediate needs of the
population such as the supply of food and availability of
clean water [33]. This isn’t so much of an issue however
in nations such as Mexico where the problems of
development are more to do with organization and
infrastructure rather than resources. In the Mexican
context these programs certainly have a great potential to
improve conditions for the general population.
2.3 Collaborative learning games
The use of collaborative games is a form of learning that
has already shown promise to improve the education of
children while at the same time helping to develop
positive character traits. This is reflected in the vast
majority of research on the subject which indicates that
students learn more effectively when they work
collaboratively [34]. Several studies point out benefits of
using collaborative methods in education [35]. These
include that;
Students learn more.
Students are more positive about school, subject
areas, and teachers or professors.
Students are more positive about each other
regardless of differences in ability, ethnic
background, or physical disability.
Students are more effective interpersonally as a
result of working cooperatively: students with
cooperative experiences are more able to take the
perspective of others, are more positive about taking part
in controversy, have better developed interaction skills,
and have a more positive expectation about working with
others.
These results aren’t surprising since we already
know that students tend to learn more in social situations
[10], and collaborative learning is intrinsically social.
Moreover, there is strong evidence that indigenous
Mesoamerican peoples in particular have a cultural
disposition to collaborative learning rather than the
traditional directed approach [36], and children with this
background may not adapt well to the more authoritarian
European-American classroom model [37]. These are all
reasons to assume that collaborative learning games
might form part of a successful strategy to improve
primary education in Oaxaca.
3 Collaborative face-to-face
videogames in the state of Oaxaca
Over-and-above the aforementioned pedagogical benefits
of collaborative learning, there are a number of practical
reasons why collaborative videogames could form part of
a realistic solution to the problems of the Oaxacan
education system. Videogames do not depend on
supervision or on language, they are also relatively cheap
to implement and maintain, and suit the way that children
naturally learn. Collaborative games can also help
children learn how to work together. This ability to work
together is in itself an important life-skill that’s often
neglected in the traditional model of classroom education
where children strive toward individual merit over the
good of the group. By encouraging students to develop
team working skills at an early age we feel this should
better equip them to grow into adults who are more able
to work together towards resolving some of the more
entrenched problems of Oaxaca and Mexican society.
Developing these skills at the same time as they
learn to use new technologies should also allow the
students to develop a more wholesome relationship with
technology and suffer less from adverse effects such as
isolation and retarded social skills [13, 38].
Figure 1. Setup of the games. Left, custom games stand set at 45 degrees and, right, children playing the games
with a robot assistant.
244 Informatica 38 (2014) 241–248 P. Craig et al.
3.1 Methodology
Our experiments to investigate how collaborative
videogames might be used in Oaxaca involved six groups
of three children aged eight to ten years. Each group
spent two hours in total playing three educational
videogames. Games were played on a forty-two inch
multi-touch screen angled at forty-five degrees and raised
between waist and head height to be ergonomically
accessible (see figure 1). The children were observed
through two-way glass with audio and video recorded
throughout the sessions to give us a permanent record of
results. The groups consisted of four groups all female
and two groups all male.
Each child was tested immediately before,
immediately after and four days after their session. The
exams used for testing included three five minute
sessions testing mathematics, languages and reading. The
students were also asked to fill in questionnaires to
provide us with more subjective information relating to
how they felt about the games and working as a team. In
addition to this, observations made during the tests
allowed us to assess the dynamics of the groups telling us
how the students interacted and how collaboration
strategies evolved.
3.2 Videogame design
The three educational games developed for our
experiment supported the learning of mathematics,
languages and reading. In order for the games to be both
accessible and challenging for children with different
levels of learning, we incorporated a gradually increasing
level of difficulty for each game. Other key aspects of
game design were promotion of inter-student interaction,
cultural relevance and age appropriateness. Here we tried
to ensure that the games were non-violent and did not
enforce gender stereotypes while encouraging the
children to identify with elements of their native Mixtec
and Mexican culture.
Two of the three educational videogames developed
for the project (those designed for mathematics and
language learning) make use of graphics based on Mixtec
codices (see figure 2). The codices are a form of
colourful hieroglyphic used by the early Mixtecos to
record their history. While these are no longer used today
for writing, they remain a strong symbol of Mixtec
culture used in logos, books and t-shirt designs. Parts of
the costumes seen in the codices are also used in
traditional ceremonies and festivals. The codices used in
the games are the jaguar, the eagle, the muerte, and the
Mixtec man. Muerte can be literally translated as death,
and the character used in our game represents a dead
friend or relative returning to visit the living. To western
eyes this might seem a morbid character to include in a
video game for young children, but the Mixtecos have a
somewhat different attitude to the symbolism
surrounding death. Mixtecos consider the ‘day of the
dead’, when the dead are said to return to visit their loved
ones, as a happy occasion to be celebrated with bright
colours and loud music.
The mathematics game developed for the project
Figure 2: Mixtec codices used as characters in the mathematics and languages videogames: Jaguar, eagle, muerte
and mixteco.
Figure 3. Screenshots of the educational videogames; left mathematics, top right languages and bottom right reading.
A Cognitonics Approach to Computer Supported Learning in… Informatica 38 (2014) 241–248 245
(figure 3 left) is a simple ‘tower defence’ type game
where the students have to solve mathematical equations
to fire eagles and prevent the muertes from reaching the
perimeter wall of their ‘tower’ and draining their energy.
The character of the user, the jaguar, sits at the left hand
side of the screen. Below this character is a keypad and
to the right a list of sums. To the right of the sums is a
vertical wall and beyond the wall are the muertes. Each
muerte advances slowly from right to left toward a sum
and if a muerte reaches the wall it stops and begins to
drain the health of the user. When the health of the user
reaches zero, the game is over. In order to stop muertes
reaching the wall, the user can answer sums to fire
eagles. The user can press on different sums to answer
them using the keypad. If a sum is answered incorrectly,
health is drained, and if a sum is answered correctly, an
eagle is fired from the wall toward the right hand side of
the screen. When a muerte is hit by an eagle, it is pushed
back away from the wall. Pushing back muertes also
adds to the users score and causes the level-up bar to rise.
When the level up bar is full, every sum fires an eagle to
push all the muertes back, and the user progresses to the
next level. As the level increases, the muertes begin to
speed up, and it becomes gradually more difficult to do
all the sums on time to keep the muertes away from the
wall.
The languages game help students to learn the names
of animals in English (figure 3 top right). This game is
another ‘tower defense’ type game similar to that used to
learn mathematics described above. However, instead of
doing sums to fire eagles, the students have to match
words in English to their Spanish translations. When
words are matched correctly eagles are fired from both
words and health is drained when words are matched
incorrectly. The game begins with a small number of
words for more common animals such as cats and dogs.
As the game advances, the difficulty level increases with
a wider variety of gradually more obscure animal names.
If the children are not already familiar with the names of
these animals in English, they can normally find the
translations out by trial and error and learn from their
mistakes.
The reading game (figure 3 bottom right) aims to
help the children with reading by asking them to
complete a story by replacing missing verbs. Literature
and authors are held in particular esteem in Mexico, and
Latin America in general, with popular authors often
considered as national heroes. This game encourages the
children to explore the Mexican national side of their
identity by using an adaptation of the short story ‘Mi
vida con la ola’ by Mexican Nobel laureate for literature
Octavio Paz.
3.3 Results
Our experiments provided us with three types of results.
Firstly, short exams taken by the students immediately
before, immediately after, and four days after the
experiments allowed us to assess how the games
contributed towards specific short-term learning
objectives. In addition to these exams, the students were
asked to fill in questionnaires to provide us with more
subjective information relating to how the students felt
about working as a team throughout the sessions. Finally,
observations made during the tests allowed us to observe
the dynamics of the groups, and how strategies evolved
during the sessions.
3.4 Exams
Table 1 summarizes the improvement in the children’s
performance in the exams after the session with the
educational games. Here we can see that the children’s
performance did not improve significantly, or
deteriorated, immediately after their session with the
games. This was most likely due to the children being
tired and over-stimulated after playing the games for two
hours. When the students were tested again, four days
after the tests, there was a significant improvement in
their performance. This improvement was particularly
marked for mathematics where the student’s performance
showed an increase of 21.9%. The improvement for
languages was 4.3% and the students regressed slightly
in their reading (by 2.1%). In order to statistically
validate our results and account for inter-sample
variance, we performed a single-tailed t-test. This gave a
p-value of 0.016 for the second test to indicate that it was
highly likely the children’s improvement was due to their
exposure to the games rather than variation of the
children’s scores overall. The p-value for improvement
in the mathematics test was 0.0018, indicating a greater
probability that the children’s improvement was due to
their exposure to the games. The p-value for the language
test was marginal at 0.20 (0.089 for the boys), indicating
Table 1. Improvement in child performance assessed by exams administered after a session with collaborative
educational games.
Improvement in performance
Immediately after the test
four days after the test
Maths
Languages
Reading
All
Maths
Languages
Reading
All
girls
%
10.00%
0.96%
0.00%
3.65%
22.08%
2.56%
1.04%
8.56%
p-value
0.111
0.421
0.500
0.243
0.012
0.215
0.500
0.393
boys
%
9.17%
-0.64%
-25.00%
-5.49%
21.67%
7.69%
-8.33%
7.01%
p-value
0.065
0.468
0.005
0.130
0.012
0.089
0.282
0.016
all
children
%
9.7%
0.4%
-8.3%
0.6%
21.9%
4.3%
-2.1%
8.0%
p-value
0.067
0.458
0.148
0.439
0.002
0.198
0.387
0.031
246 Informatica 38 (2014) 241–248 P. Craig et al.
that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that
exposure to the games caused an improvement in the
children’s results (using the standard p-value threshold of
0.05). Results also indicate that there is insufficient
evidence to conclude that the drop in reading
performance was due to exposure to the reading game
(with a p-value of 0.38).
3.5 Questionnaires and observations
The questionnaires filled in by students and observations
made during the experiments provided us with more
subjective information regarding the benefits of our
educational games. The first thing we noticed was the
short time the children took to learn how to play the
games. On average it took around two minutes for the
children to develop an understanding of how each game
worked. During the following five or ten minutes the
children would develop basic game strategies and
continue developing these while playing the games. The
students also developed collaboration strategies such as
coordinated turn taking, task delegation and thinking
aloud. In general, the boys tended to prefer the
mathematics game while the girls preferred the reading
game. The boys and girls also tended to use different
strategies for the reading game. The girls would read
larger sections of the text aloud, following the story.
Boys tended to use a more direct strategy of reading
individual sentences and trying to use grammatical rules
to choose a word. The boys also tended to be more
competitive, celebrate more when an answer was correct,
and argue more over whose turn it would be to operate
the interface. All of the student groups spent around
about equal time playing each of the different games and
tended to spend around twenty minutes or half an hour
playing a game before moving on to the next.
The positive feelings the children had toward the
games were reflected both in observed behaviour and
questionnaire results. At the end of the sessions the
children wanted to continue playing even after two hours.
In the questionnaires the children told us they enjoyed
the gaming sessions and would be very happy to use the
games for future learning. The children particularly
enjoyed being able to learn together with their fellow
students and found the graphical nature of the games
stimulating. They recognized the characters from the
codices and felt this helped them relate to the games. The
story used in the reading game was not familiar to the
students but those who followed the text in the session
expressed an interest in learning more about the story.
4 Conclusion
The results of the evaluation presented in this paper
demonstrate the potential of collaborative games to
improve the educational experience of children in the
Mixtec region of Mexico. This includes the development
of academic abilities and inter-personal skills together so
as to realise a more balanced learning experience and
prevent more negative personality traits such as isolation
and anti-social tendencies that might otherwise be the
result of less interactive education models such as private
study with a computer [13, 14].
Evaluating exam scores before and after gaming
sessions showed a statistically significant improvement
of over 20% in results for mathematics. Results for the
languages were positive though not conclusive due to the
small sample size and natural variation between student
grades. While the exam results did not show an
improvement for reading, a number of children involved
in the study felt encouraged to develop an interest in the
story presented during the game.
More importantly, the games allowed the children to
develop important team working skills and encouraged
them to identify with different aspects of their native
culture. While it is normal for students to interact during
playtime, interaction during class-time is relatively
scarce, and since team working is such an important skill
in the modern work-place, we feel that this would make
our collaborative videogames a valuable addition to the
children’s schooling.
It is also important that the games worked well with
children working together while using information
technology. We believe that this type of working can
move children away from the idea of computing as a
solitary anti-social activity and towards a more positive
outlook where computers are seen as a tool for helping
rather that replacing human interaction. The exercise also
prepares the students for new computing paradigms such
as ubiquitous computing and augmented reality that are
likely to involve concurrent collaborative working in the
future.
Acknowledgements
The authors of this paper would like to acknowledge the
help of the following persons without whom we could
not have been able to realise the experiments described in
this paper. Firstly, we would like to thank the teachers,
students and the parents of students at Escuela Primaria
Rural Benito Juárez in Acatlima Oaxaca for participating
in and facilitating our experiments and tests. We would
also like to thank Carlos Martinez and Mario Moreno for
helping us to use the excellent UsaLab facility at the
Universidad Tecnológica de la Mixteca, and José Aníbal
Arias Aguilar, Ana Delia Olvera Cervantes, Ariadna
Benítez Saucedo, Jessica Santos and Mario Alberto
Cortes for help during the experiments. Also at the UTM,
we would like to thank Rodolfo Palma Guzman and his
team at de Taller de Metal Mécanica for the design and
construction of the adjustable large screen display stands
used in the experiments. Finally, this article would not
have been possible without the generous funding of
Proyecto Conacyt 152 008 teorías, métodos y modelos de
la complejidad social.
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