On Evaluating SkillVille: An Educational Mobile Game on Visual Perception Skills

As technological advancement and innovation continually rise globally, the applications of such progress is evident in many fields, most especially in education. Knowing that education is essential to foster holistic growth especially in children, the researchers aim to maximize the potential of technology as a way to facilitate learning in a child's growing years. From books to educational applications and games, various educational mobile tools for children have now been developed. However, most of these applications lack significant features for learning, such as an assessment of one's performance, as well as the involvement of the teachers and parents of the users. SkillVille aims to propose solutions to these problems. SkillVille is an educational mobile game developed using Corona SDK and published in Android platform. This paper discusses SkillVille as an aid for learning focused on three (3) basic and most common visual perception skills namely language and spelling, searching and sorting, and memory skills. Learning analytics is used for monitoring performance and possible improvement of users per game played. This also includes discussion about evaluation of the application by school teachers and user experience testing by children of ages 4-7. Test results show SkillVille's high potential as a learning tool for children.