An Educational Game Helping Learners to Distinguish Similar Chinese Characters while Minimizing Human Efforts in Game Content Creation

Abstract

One of the difficulties in learning Chinese Characters is distinguishing similar characters. Usually similar characters have quite different meanings. This can cause misunderstanding and miscommunication in daily life. It is thus important for students learning the Chinese language to be able to distinguish similar characters and understand their proper usage. In this chapter, the authors propose some educational games to train students to distinguish similar characters. As Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) software, the proposed educational games can reduce the workload of teachers for delivering language lessons. By applying Computer Assisted Item Generation (CAIG) technique, a large amount of assessment items can be generated efficiently. The authors propose a method to identify similar Chinese characters such that the game content creation can be made automatic thus minimizing the human efforts. Learners need to understand the concepts rather than memorize the answers in order to perform well in the games. This results in a high replay value for the proposed educational games.