Week 1: Cellphone Training

This week (June 3-9) was a flurry of activities. We commenced our fieldwork at the village primary school on Monday. As some background info, the kids were aged 6-10 (grades 1-5). They excited to see us again and loved asking us to take photos of them. :)

Since a substantial fraction of the kids have neither used a cellphone before nor interacted with mobile applications, one of our objectives this week was to familiarize them with basic cellphone controls. We showed them how to play a Tangram mobile game on Mon and Tue in order to give them practice with the arrow, Enter, numeric and left+right soft buttons on the cellphone keypad.

A second objective was to establish the right set of expectations with the kids. We felt that when we were in Mysore in January 2007, we had inadvertently created an impression among the kids that we were there to have fun with them, when we introduced several games to familiarize them with the cellphone, prior to rolling out the educational cellphone games and audio modules a week later.

Hence, this time, we wanted to be clear that the primary purpose of our presence was to help them learn English. On Wed to Fri, we introduced an audio unit on the cellphone that aimed to develop their English vocabulary and acquaint them with simple English sentencial forms (including pronouns), which they can subsequently use to construct new sentences.

Our third objective was to learn more about them, so that this cultural knowledge can inform our designs of mobile applications for this learner group. We conducted semi-structured interviews with them, during which we asked them questions about their families, after-school activities and future aspirations.

In the process, we were surprised to learn that the older kids (grades 4-5) have prior cellphone experience. We had initially thought that none of them had used cellphones before. From our interviews data, out of the 47 kids from grades 2-5, 19 of them had parents who owned cellphones. It also appeared that many parents were comfortable with letting their older kids use the the equipment. I was amazed at the cellphone penetration rate in that village.

In terms of results, we were seeing better post-test gains this time, mostly because we were careful not to create expectations among the kids that we were there only to play electronic games with them. We are also getting very helpful feedback from our interpreters. We hired several of the same interpreters from the January 2007 study, and they are now much more comfortable and familiar with our work to give us design feedback.

Onward!