Toward Game-Based Learning of Japanese Writing for Elementary School Students

It is a long-standing problem that many elementary school students in Japan have an aversion to writing compositions. To address the problem, we designed an AI educational game for elementary school students to study Japanese writing utilizing existing language resources. In the game, players construct simple and complex sentences by connecting given word cards with particle marks. The constructed sentences are automatically scored using large-scale language resources, allowing players to receive on-the-spot feedback, such as how to improve the use of a case marker. We also developed smartphone and web applications of the game and conducted a user study to assess it. The results of the user study demonstrated that our application can be used as a good introduction to studying Japanese writing.