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.

NHN announces publishing contract for Hanjamaru

On Monday, November 8th, NHN announced its publishing contract with Eduflo for the game Hanjamaru in an official press release. The company cited the game’s content and critic acclaim as the main reasons for its decision to enter into a publishing contract with Eduflo. The press release lauds both the design of the game and the fact that Eduflo participated in the 2008 Edutainment Exposition, managed by both the Korean Ministry of Science and Technology, as well as the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. It also praises the fact that in the Ministry of Science and Technology's competition held for the best business in e-learning, Hanjamaru was selected as a winner in the category of educational software.

The press release goes on to praise Hanjamaru for contents that are both entertaining and educational so that not only will young, internet users enjoy the game, but also places their parents in a position to appreciate it. The director of NHN has said that upon its release in 2009, Hanjamaru will become a leading internet business with sound educational content and a functional game, to be held in positive recognition. With regard to Hanjamaru’s reduction of extracurricular educational fees and improvement of educational methods, parents of school children will welcome the online service with anticipation.

NHN Corporation is Korea’s leading Internet company and operates South Korea’s most used search portal, Naver (http://www.naver.com/), as well as the leading online game portal, Hangame (http://www.hangame.com/), and the leading children’s portal, Jr. Naver, (http://www.jr.naver.com/). With its two business pillars of search and games, NHN provides a variety of online services and has come to be the nation’s largest Internet company in terms of its net profit. As a result, NHN’s taking on the publishing of Hanjamaru is mutually beneficial to both companies, and positions both Eduflo and NHN to reap great benefits in the near future.

Every 15 minutes users learn 2+ characters

After conducting its first experiment, Eduflo knew that students were concentrating on the Chinese characters 3/4 of the time that they played the game. However, Eduflo did not know just how effective that concentration was when it came to the students actually learning to recognize characters on the official test of Chinese characters that they would be taking later on. As a result, Eduflo tested 120 students to see how many characters they knew before playing the game and how many characters they learned by playing the game for 15 minutes.

The results of the experiment were impressive. In just 15 minutes of game play students learned an average of over 2 characters. Results from the five groups ranged from an average of 1.9 to an average of 3 characters learned in just 15 minutes of having fun playing Hanjamaru! These results clearly reveal Hanjamaru to be an edutainment success story in the making. According to Eduflo’s results, if students spent the 2 hours they normally spend on playing computer games on playing Hanjamaru, they would be learning over 8 characters an hour, 16 characters a day and a total of more than 6,000 characters a year!

Users focus on the characters while playing!

The eye tracker that was used to detect what the game's user was focusing on.

The figure above displays how a user's sight was tracked.

The figure above shows the experiment in progress.

In order to get Hanjamaru up to snuff, educationally speaking, Eduflo decided to do some research as to whether students were concentrating on the game’s flaming swords, pretty backgrounds or the Chinese characters themselves, which are the real meat and potatoes of the game. In order to test what images players concentrate on while playing the game, Eduflo tracked the eye movement of players as they progressed through different levels of play. The results of the experiment were overwhelmingly conclusive that users are focusing on the actual Chinese characters 76.3% of the time!

Surveys have shown that the average Korean elementary school student spends around 2 hours a day playing video games. If those 2 hours spent playing an assortment of video games purely for entertainment were spent on studying, a student could learn a whole new skill, such as language ability or musical talent, and learn it rapidly. Given the fact that students spend 3/4 of the time playing Hanjamaru concentrating on Chinese characters, if the average of 2 hours of game play was spent on Hanjamaru instead of on a game that was only constructed for the purpose of pure entertainment, the student would spend an average of 1.5 hours a day studying Chinese characters!

Eduflo has revolutionized character learning

Eduflo took the fact that to increase character recognition a student needs constant, meaningful exposure to characters and decided that the best way to make this type of exposure attractive to students was by working it into a game. Eduflo found that by utilizing the story lines and fighting methods of an RPG, Chinese characters could be easily taught since their acquisition becomes fun for players. In addition, the community and socializing aspect of an MMORPG also helps to make playing the game an engaging social activity.

Every time a player confronts the game’s monsters (and there are a lot of them) the player not only sees a character on the monster, but also hears and sees the pronunciation of the character with each hit. In addition, the player is told the meaning of the character upon killing it, so that the player not only learns to recognize the shape of a character, but also its pronunciation and meaning. Since this method of learning focuses on training to recognize characters rather than testing, players have fun playing the game. After all, it really is a fun MMORPG and not a “game” which really only consists of constant, tedious testing.

In addition, players actively expand their character recognition and vocabulary through the process of obtaining new items and skills. These items and skills are used to modify their appearance, help them recover their health and magic skills while in a fight, and inflict more damage on monsters, As such, players have a high degree of motivation to learn about character construction and expand their vocabulary.

How do you learn characters?

The key to learning Chinese characters has been and always will be repetition. To start out Chinese elementary school children write each character a hundred or two hundred times, painfully learning how to recognize and write each new character. Once a student grows more familiar with an extensive base of characters, it is easier to form and remember more complicated characters. As a result, the more characters a student has learned, the easier it is to learn characters.

The same learning method that Chinese school children use is also employed by foreign students of the Chinese language. At any university where Chinese is taught, you can find students complaining about how much time studying Chinese requires. 4 Chinese credits can seem like 12 given the amount of time needed to write and rewrite characters hundreds of times..

However, in order to learn how to recognize characters, rather than write them, it’s not necessary to write the characters repeatedly. A very sore hand is certainly one method to increase one’s character recognition, but a student can avoid that painful experience by repeated, meaningful exposure to the characters. When a student studies abroad in China, learning characters becomes immensely easier for him or her since he or she will see characters repeatedly in certain situations where the meaning is readily apparent. For instance, a student will see the characters for 包子 every time she or he orders a steam bun. As such, riding on the subway, ordering in a restaurant, finding ones way on the street, all become activities that involve learning to recognize characters through constant exposure, rather than through filling one’s notebook with characters.

A way in which I extremely quickly increased the amount of characters I recognized was through online chatting. Since instant messaging forces a student to read what is being said to them, a student rather quickly becomes familiar with new characters even if they do not take the effort to actually look them up. I would often come across characters that I knew the meaning of, but for which I had no clue as to the pronunciation. This made it easier for me to pick up new words in class and on the streets of China, and when it came time for my teachers to force me to learn how to write them, it took significantly less handwritten repetitions.

How are characters constructed?

Some Chinese characters are pictograms, like 象 for elephant, 日 for sun, 月 for moon, and 木 for tree. However, this is a very small category of characters. Other characters are ideograms, which are iconic illustrations, like 上 for up and 下 for down. Another category of characters is ideogrammic compounds, which entails the symbolic combination of pictograms or ideograms in order to create another character. For instance, 明 combines the pictograms for two natural light sources, the sun and the moon, in order to create the character for bright. And 林, the character for forest, is a combination of two trees.

The category with the most characters is phono-semantic compounds, which are composed of two parts: a pictograph, which indicates the general meaning of the character, and a preexisting character which suggests the pronunciation of the character. For instance, 架 (jia), which can mean a frame or a shelf, is composed of 加 (jia) to indicate the sound and 木 (mu), which means tree, to show that it’s made of wood. Many of the simplifications adopted by the PRC also replaced the phonetic part of a character to make it simpler. For instance, the word 戰 in traditional script, 战 (zhan), which means battle, has the sound component of 占 zhan and the meaning component of 戈 (ge) which is a lance. This system makes it possible to memorize the thousands of different characters necessary in order to be literate in Chinese.

The history of Chinese characters

The earliest evidence of Chinese writing has been found on oracle bones from the Shang Dynasty, dating to around 3000 years ago. They were used to record predictions and advice concerning the future. Although there did exist more than one script at the time, by the Zhou dynasty, seal script had evolved and it was standardized and adopted as the script for all of China during the Qin dynasty (You may remember the Qin emperor from the Jet Li movie, Hero). That script has since then slowly evolved into the form used today.

In the 1950s and 60s, the PRC on mainland China adopted a simplified script, while Hong Kong, Macau and the ROC on Taiwan have. Many of the simplifications adopted by the PRC had been in existence in informal contexts for years or were in existence in earlier times, such as during the Shang Dynasty, as the proper character or as an acceptable variant.

Can games change education?

Eduflo makes education more engaging for students by giving students immediate feedback and payoff in return for time spent “studying”. Whereas traditional study methods leave a student feeling like they are spending tremendous amounts of effort and getting nothing out of it, studying though a game allows students to see marked improvement at much shorter intervals.
In other words, the students continually experience a sense of achievement that keeps them playing and keeps them learning.