Game based spelling learning

Game-based learning aims at getting people to learn about a certain subject or to acquire certain skills by means of playing. Educational games must fulfill both recreational and didactic goals in order to succeed. This paper introduces a pac-man like educational game, designed to learn orthography and foreign language vocabulary. A brief description of the game is provided, together with the results of experimental evaluation. Experimental data include subjective opinions about entertainment and learning potential credited by the students and objective measures of learning improvements. Reported results demonstrate that the developed game successfully fulfills the entertainment requirements, while achieving a significant learning effectiveness.