Gamification and Serious Games Based Learning for Early Childhood in Rural Areas

Early childhood education has a high impact on the success of higher education. Besides, it allows a sustainable social and economic development of the country. It enables a relevant upbringing and education of future generations by providing the necessary skills and competencies. This is especially regarding African developing countries and rural areas in particular. Therefore, it is necessary to support the development of the early childhood education in terms of apprehending the knowledge and improving the children’s skills. Actually, recent pedagogical and neuroscience researches show that the best way to teach children is through playing, getting their attention, their engagement, receiving feedback and consolidating their skills. In fact, playing represents a natural and privileged method for children’s learning. Correspondingly, our approach integrates all aspects mentioned above to develop a playful and creative learning. The proposed approach is a play-based learning using the Montessori pedagogical principal as a core of the method that is implanted in several types of serious games. This paper proposes a Montessori’s Method based on serious games solution. We developed several serious games according to an agile method. Future works will focus on deploying and validating this solution in a real context, precisely in rural preschools near Marrakech. Our aim is to evaluate the user’s experience and assess the children’s acceptance and usefulness of our system.