S. Natkin and J. Dupire (Eds.): ICEC 5709, pp. 295–296, 2009. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009 MobiSpell: Educational Mobile Game Design and Development for Teaching Spelling to Young Children Menelaos Bakopoulos and Sofia Tsekeridou Athens Information Technology, 0.8km Markopoulou Ave., 19002 Peania, Athens, Greece {mbak,sots}@ait.edu.gr Abstract. A 3D educational mobile game is designed and implemented with the aim to teach hard-to-spell words to young children exploiting their natural affin- ity towards games entertainment in order to increase the likelihood of useful knowledge acquisition while having fun. The educational game features a fighter plane style environment in which spelling is accomplished by shooting down letters. Incentives and motivation such as points and medals encourage learning and motivate children to develop skills. The J2ME Mobile 3D Graph- ics library is used with 3D models developed in 3DS MAX, and development taking place in Netbeans. Keywords: educational game, mobile game, game design, game development. 1 Introduction, Goals, and Design Principles Rapid technological development has led to modern mobile platforms having equiva- lent computational power with the early nineties PCs – this has set the grounds to develop entertaining educational mobile games leading it to be a rapidly developing field all over the world. In this paper, we present an educational mobile game in which a child takes the role of a pilot being tasked with the mission to shoot down various letters and oppo- nents necessary to spell a word correctly. The child is guided by various multimedia cues (such as photos) and blanks representing letters as to which letter should be spelled. In the sequel, we elaborate on key aspects considered in MobiSpell’s design referring to deployed technologies and theories, and continue by describing the basic implementation, with conclusions for future work. MobiSpell’s game design has focused on achieving an increased player experience, fun and at the same time learning. Enjoyment directly affects the time spent playing and hence the knowledge retention a child will achieve [1], which made it the primary design principle. Motivation mechanisms such as rewards in the form of praise, points and power-ups have been included as an integral part of the game in order to stimulate game play (Figure 1) with enemies and a timer to play against providing a competitive element [2] to increase enjoyment. An AI component has been included based on a defined state machine interoperating with autonomous moving agents [3] in order to provide an additional competitive element.