Collaborative Games on Mobile Phones

There are many efforts to utilize the mobile phone as a computing platform in developing regions of the world. One effective approach is to build educational games for children in these regions. Existing games in this space are typically single-player affairs, devoid of the possibly beneficial element of collaboration between multiple learners. We seek to explore the feasibility of creating multiplayer mobile phone games based on traditionally multiplayer real-life games played by children in these regions, in such a way as to encourage collaboration between players. We describe a game called Colour Colour that was built for this purpose and the results of initial deployments of this game to children in rural India and ESL students in California. ACM Classification