– What’s the full scope of the problem?

During my undergrad, I had created a one of its kind Indian language word building game ‘AKSHARIT’. Unlike English which has a 26 letter set, Hindi and most other Indian languages have ~40 consonants and ~15 vowels (used like diacritic marks in French), leading to ~600 possible letters. Thus, if one were to make an exact replica of the Scrabble boardgame for Indian languages, one would need around 4000 tiles and the playing board would be bigger than a double bed. I overcame this issue by an innovative tile design, that used transparent tiles for the diacritic marks, these could be placed atop the opaque consonant tiles to form all the different letter combinations. Using these the game could be played using only 130 tiles versus 4000 earlier.

Using these tiles as building blocks, a bevy of language learning games could now be created for younger learners, thus making the traditionally dry subject of learning the Hindi language a much more fun and engaging experience for children. We created both physical and digital versions of our language learning games.

– Who’s affected?

Children ages 4-10 year olds, especially the ones studying in more traditional government schools located in tier-2 and tier 3 cities of India, where still much of the instruction is limited to students attending lectures passively and relying just on textbooks to learn the subject matter.

– Who’s best positioned to address the problem?

Most attempts made at creating language learning fun are either made by teachers themselves or by professional game and app developers. Quite often games and activities created by language teachers are not really as fun and engaging, whereas games made by game and app developers although more fun but often lack measurable learning outcomes. To solve this issue, we had a team of three people with one game designer, a language teacher and an educator turned app developer.

– What are predictable consequences of the proposed solution?

The game was initially piloted in over 1000 schools. Subsequently pre and post tests conducted showed promising results in improving language learning outcomes for young learners. Currently the game is being used in 3000 schools. Each game box had a pre-stamped post card in it, using which teachers could share there feedback about the game back to us. We received 750 such postcards back, with promising feedback and also qualitative anecdotes from teachers regarding the positive effect of the game in their classrooms.