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Digital Games to Improve Learning in Haiti

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Abstract

Imagine producing curricula to teach a new language to an audience in a different country that has never had access to computers or the Internet. How will instructional designers and teachers communicate when worlds are so vastly different? Before reading, writing, or speaking, images and movement facilitate communication. This article describes a service-learning design case led by faculty at a southeastern university in the United States. It involved iterative instructional design (ID), development, and a formative evaluation process by which university students created digital games for twenty-three children in Haiti with minimal to no schooling. Lessons learned include how visual literacy (VL) is as crucial for the designers of instruction as it is for the recipients.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to the 2019-2020 University of Tampa Research Innovation and Scholarly Excellence (RISE) Award/Dana Foundation Grant for funding this project, university students, faculty, especially Drs. Erben and Schimmel, and CARHA for their collaborative support.

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  1. The University of Tampa, Tampa, FL, USA

    Suzanne Ensmann

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  1. Suzanne Ensmann
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Correspondence to Suzanne Ensmann.

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In compliance with Ethical Standards, researchers obtained informed consent from all individual participants and guardians included in the evaluations.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest in this study.

Research Involving Human Participants and/or Animals

All procedures performed in this study involving human participants followed ethical standards and the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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Ensmann, S. Digital Games to Improve Learning in Haiti. TechTrends 65, 884–895 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-021-00630-8

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