Eliana Medina
CSE590
Winter 2004
March 7, 2004
Comparison of user activities when interacting with educational Software or
computer games
(English as a second language learning process)
When learning a second language, technology can be very helpful to practice the
new skills, especially in situations when students speak the first language most of the
time.
From my experience as a second language student I used an educational software
called English teacher, that allowed me to increase and practice English vocabulary,
grammar, listening comprehension and some speaking skills. Also I benefited from
playing English adventure games to improve my skills.
I am interested in exploring as a research project how people learn a second
language from educational software compare to how they learn from computer games
designed to learn a second language.
The idea is to gather information from students’ interactions with educational
software (English teacher) and a computer game (Journalist), to explore the different
patterns of students’ interactions with different computer medias that teach the same
content using different formats.
The English teacher software is a commercial application and already collects
some information about students learning progress in log files, such as number of words
or grammar rules learned and number of days practicing the new words or grammar rule.
The game Journalist (Periodista) is part of the games to teach research project and
is in a developmental phase, the goal of the game is to teach Spanish in a simulation
game like situation. The player travel to a Spanish speaker country and has to work as a
journalist to report the political, economical and day to day news in that country, while
learning the language and culture at the same time.
I will develop two similar applications, one English teacher like software that
allow me to register students interaction with the application, in addition to the already
stored information the software provides, and also will develop a Journalist like game,
that will simulate the same environment but instead of teaching Spanish it will be for
teaching English, and will register user interaction with the application and similar data
English teacher stored to track progress.
After developing the applications and the tools that will help me to analyze the
information, I will test the educational software and computer game with 20 ESL students
with the same level of knowledge, 10 students will use the educational software and 10
students will play the computer game. Then I will observe the differences and similarities
in interaction with the technology and learning outcomes from the data the system will
provide me (log files).