A mobile game-based learning system for diacritic insertion

Abstract

This work reports the development of a mobile game-based learning system for Yoruba diacritics with a motive to provide an interesting means of learning its diacritics insertion procedure for effective reading and writing in the language. Data were gathered from Yoruba language texts, interview and internet sources and grouped into levels of difficulty based on the number of syllables contained in each word. Two and three syllable words, four syllable words, five and six syllable words were categorised as easy, intermediate and hard levels respectively. The corpus was formed into a JSON object. The system was designed and implemented using the unified modelling language and JavaScript framework, ReactNative applications for iOS and Android. A randomly selected sample of 85 students was used for the evaluation of the system. Questionnaire containing twenty items, which was drawn based on the heuristics evaluation components, was used to measure its effectiveness as a tool for learning and skill acquisition. All the students who were given questionnaires indicated that they strongly agreed to keep using the game for play and learning purposes. The research concludes that the resource makes learning the language practical, fun, interesting and can be used anywhere in relation to the facilities owned by the students.