The Korean Government Now Supports Online Games

Recently the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism recently announced a push for educational games to become a part of the official curriculum in Korean schools. After tests that were administered from 2005 to 2008 in multiple grammar schools and high schools, playing online games was found to significantly raise students’ test scores. In fact, the average score of students on an English vocabulary test doubled, from 41.1 to 80.1 points, after playing educational internet games.

Cultivate the market for functional, educational games and to raise awareness of them. The ministry of Science and Technology has decided hereafter to change the negative recognition that games receive and contribute to the creation of a market for them.

A copy of the article with the original report in Korean can be found here.

NHN has announced the results of the CBT

On Monday, February 2nd, NHN announced the results of Hanjamaru’s closed beta test. In total, 26,000 people tested the game and were exposed to an average of 13 Chinese characters in the span of an hour. According to the results shown through administering one test before playing the game and one test afterwards, game players can naturally become familiar with these 13 Chinese characters. Vast improvement was especially apparent for those testers under 10 years old.

Before the test, in the second half of last year, 6th grade students were tested at Seoul National University's psychology department’s language and thought laboratory in order to ascertain the effectiveness of the game as a learning tool for characters.

During the testing period, as users played the game, at the time when monsters attacked, the sound of the Chinese characters was heard repeatedly and the effect that the size of the monsters and the effect that the style of their attack had upon the subject’s gaze was measured to test for learning and recognition.

Among the elementary school students that were tested it was found that during the period when monsters attacked, the children’s vision focused mainly upon the Chinese characters and they were listening to the sound of the characters. According to the analysis of the educational effectiveness of the game, in terms of auditory and visual senses, a sort of Pavlovian condition is created in Hanjamaru as the shape of the Chinese characters and the sound of them are combined and associated together by the users.

Furthermore, the Chinese character’s appearance and Korean pronunciation for every vocabulary word are simply combined for the user. In order to acquire weapons, the composition of different elements of the characters is broken down and the player must construct them in order to understand the principles and process of character formation. As a result, the game attains good educational results.

During this round of testing, one 3rd grade student, Minseo Lee, said, “Every time I grab a fat monster with a Chinese character on its body, the character’s sound is played and I feel like I’ve learned the character. While I play the game, my parents praise me so that I feel really good”.

Suyun Gwan (43, white collar worker), a parent that played Hanjamaru with her children during the test, said that, ”Through the game, interest is held and through repetitive learning educational results arise that aren’t those of a craming session, but that are natural. Since the children are able to happily and voluntarily study Chinese characters, I’m excited for this new educational method.”

The original article can be seen in korean: here.

We've entered final CBT and we've got a demo video!

Above, you can view the nifty, new demo video we've created for our game Hanjamaru!

The beginning of the video displays the process of setting up the character's account, managing the items that the character has collected, and a map of the levels that the character has progressed through. The video then features clips of gameplay throughout different levels.

We've officially entered closed beta testing (CBT) for the game and the responses we've had from parents and children that have tried it out have been overwhelmingly positive. The parents love the new educational method and the children love the game.

What is Eduflo?

Eduflo was founded in 2006 by Mr. Kim, a computer specialist, and Mr. Park, an education specialist, with the goal of revolutionizing education. Through its innovative products, Eduflo seeks to increase the level of engagement students have while learning. In effect, Eduflo aims to takes the tedium out of study by making it entertaining through the development of pioneering software. In other words, Eduflo is developing games and other software that makes the learning process so enjoyable for students, that they forget they’re even learning. As such, Eduflo’s games can compete not only with educational software, but also with traditional games that have no educational value whatsoever.

Eduflo’s first product, scheduled to be released early next year, makes Chinese characters easy and fun to learn. By working the Chinese characters into an MMORPG computer game format, players don’t even realize they are studying as they learn to recognize characters. The Korean version of the game, which is the first to be released, covers all of the characters that students need to know in order to do well on the official Chinese character test in Korea.

In order to develop the best product on the market, Mr. Kim and Mr. Park enlisted the help of a psychologist from Harvard University, as well as a Chinese linguist from a prestigious Korean university. With their expertise in consideration, Hanjamaru was designed to be an especially effective educational tool as well as a fun game.

Company History
2006
December
- Eduflo was established!

2007
March
- Having won the Edutainment contest by the Korea Culture & Content Agency (KOCCA) Eduflo received support from KOCCA

June
- Selected as the Nintendo 3rd party(software developer)

September
-Selected as a new technology nurturing business by Ministry of Knowledge and economy

December
-Contract with SK telecom signed for education platform service consulting

2008
February
-Seoul National University psychology department cooperated in an experiment on the learning effects of Hanjamaru

April
-Eduflo was selected as a new technology venture company by the Korean government

July
-Softbank ventures and JAFCO Asia made a cooperative investment in Eduflo

August
-Participated in the 2008 Edutainment Exposition, managed by the Korean Ministry of Science and Technology, as well as the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism

-Selected as a winner in the category of educational software at an e-learning contest held by the Ministry of Science and Technology

December
-Eduflo and NHN sign a publishing contract for Hanjamaru

Korea's #1 educational institute plans to use Hanjamaru!

Koreans are all about education and almost every elementary, middle and high school student attends after school classes at educational institutes known as hakwons. These hakwons are private schools, run for profit, that may teach all subjects or specialize in one specific discipline, like mathematics or English. They are popularly described as "cram schools". Among them, Digital Daesung is the leader in on and off-line education.

Digital Daesung has decided to use Eduflo's game Hanjamaru as a part of its curriculum for teaching Chinese characters. Students will be assigned to study with the game as homework and instructors will be able to monitor the progress that students are making in the game.

This is the first time that any private institute of this kind has decided to mandate the use of a educational game as part of its curriculum. However, due to the intrinsic educational value of Hanjamaru, Digital Daesung, as a leader in education, has decided to start a new trend and adopt Hanjamaru as an educational tool for its students.

Training Games vs. Testing Games

Almost all the companies out there that are developing educational games at the moment have been focusing on creating test-based games. These games present the player with numerous questions, just like a standardized test would, using the format of multiple choice answers or a fill in the blank box. Although these games are easy to make, and hence comprise most of the market, they can only be successfully played if the user has previously studied and learned the proper methods to solve the contents of the test questions.

When Eduflo began developing Hanjamaru it decided to create a training-based game so that users wouldn't need to have previously studied Chinese characters or need to spend vast amounts of time outside playing the game in order to master the subject. Instead of a test-based game, Eduflo studied training games and looked at how to incorporate Chinese character study into an RPG game format. Since over 90% of RPG games include battle contents, Eduflo determined that the optimal game design to teach Chinese character recognition would utilize this battling feature of RPGs. As a result, Hanjamaru uses battling monsters, unlocking items and special missions in order to incorporate character learning into the design of the game. In this way, Hanjamaru insures that players master character recognition without needing to spend hours of study outside of playing the game.

Why are traditional learning methods boring?

The problem with traditional learning methods is that their delayed payoff often frustrates students and causes them to lose interest. The less of a sense of achievement a student has, the less she or he will be interested in studying. Unfortunately, when the only feedback a student has during weeks upon weeks of studying is a few practice tests he can take before the real exam, it’s extremely easy, especially for younger students, to lose all motivation to study.

As such, the immediate payoff that comes from playing a game attracts students, while the delayed payoff of traditional learning methods often leave a student feeling frustrated and on the verge of quitting. When a student feels that he is constantly making headway, as progression through the levels of a game allows him to feel, he is easily motivated to continue playing the game, i.e. to continue “studying”. Hanjamaru thus allows students to study Chinese characters with constant, immediate rewards and feedback on the progress of their studies.


The above graph shows the relationship between payoff and effort using traditional learning methods.


In this graph, the yellow line represents traditional learning methods, while the green line represents educational games.

The above graphs give a visual representation of how the relationship between effort and payoff work when using traditional learning methods and how the relationship changes when students study by using an educational game.

The first graph of the effects of traditional learning methods shows the long plateaus present, where a student spends more and more effort but doesn’t notice any additional payoff. That’s how a student gets frustrated and loses interest.

The second graph shows the rate of payoff when playing a game like Hanjamaru. The green line shows the vastly shorter plateaus and more constant rate of payoffs, giving a student a sense of accomplishment and allowing them to realize the progress they're making.