Since this week’s theme is mobile games, I decided to do some mining for articles about educational mobile games. Through my research, I found a couple of relevant articles but I picked the one mentioned above as it is close to home. I read the article and agreed with most of it. While I understand the potential of mobile serious games for learning and the growing market of mobile phones in Africa, I am still doubtful how effective these games will be if they need internet access. I wrote about the lack of internet/WiFi connection in Africa before. It is a reality though. Game developers should factor that in when creating serious games for the African market. Definitely the focus should be placed on designing offline mobile serious games. You can find the article at the following link.
Hey Pascaline,
This is already a huge movement in SA. I have 5 friends who have all separately just completed Masters/PhD research on the topic of mobile gaming in Africa (all at South African Universities). Make Games Africa, and the Goethe Gaming Institute, are becoming huge platforms for building, funding, networking, and awareness as well. We regularly host game jams in Gugulethu, Khayelitsha, Soweto, and other places (often with the help of Bandwidth Barn) where we both test educational games and help others to learn how to make games themselves.
It’s a huge movement! Get involved if you’re keen 🙂
Here is some info from our gaming conference in Cape Town over the last 2 years 🙂
http://gamesweek.africa/make-games-africa/
http://gamesweek.africa/make-games-africa/
Hi Jamie,
Thanks for the link. I will have a look at the two links after this term as I am currently jugging two modules this term. Next term, my aim is to learn coding so that I can start playing around with 3D game design.
Awesome! If you ever want, feel free to email me on jamiedimitraashton@gmail.com and I can put you in touch with some people in the SA educational gaming ecosystem 🙂 They’re great people all-round, and host game jams where learning devs can jump in and learn whilst having fun!
Pascaline, thank you for posting this, because I think it’s important for us to expand our knowledge of ed tech and mobile tech to global issues. I have done a tiny bit of research in some ed tech in Africa that has leveraged Facebook Free Basics to deliver content and provide users with access to discussion and chatbots and how SMS can be utilized to provide students with access to content and homework help, but I have not considered the importance and impact serious games could have if everyone had access to them. There must be more solutions for people to download packs and updates when they have access to continue playing and for games to not have to rely on constant internet connectivity.
Hi Melissa,
I guess there’s much for me to discover about ed tech in Africa. Technology has been changing the lives of millions of people and I believe the same phenomenon could happen in Africa if people could access educational resources through the net. However presently, many areas are not even covered by 3G so people don’t get to harness the benefits of the web 2.0. As for serious games, Africa is pretty much an untapped market . I’m glad that professionals are getting together to create a movement about this technology. Nonetheless much remains to be done to make either internet access or serious games ubiquitous.