Towards a mobile serious game environment for children self-learning

Even with all the efforts worldwide achieving universal primary education is still a crucial challenge. Aiming a contribute to solve this problem, we designed a serious game to provide education for children, as a supplement to daily school learning and/or in lieu of availability of regular schooling. A mobile serious game, introducing concepts of Mathematics and English, was developed and evaluated with children. The results showed the effectiveness of the serious game into motivating children to take part in the educational activity and suggested an improvement in their knowledge. Moreover, it highlighted aspects in the game design, pedagogical pattern, game instruction and tablet interaction that could be improved. These results have important implications for future research in this field, showing positive outcomes from the design approach and providing recommendations for further research in this field.