Flash card game to help students learn Arabic faster

NILAI: In his efforts to help students facing difficulty mastering Arabic, a university lecturer has created a flash card game to ease learning and eventually, able to construct sentences faster and better in that language.
Lecturer Hamadallah Mohammad Salleh from the Faculty of Major Language Studies, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM), here, said some students needed extra time just to translate an Arabic word, before they were able to form sentences.
"Looking around, I could not find any educational game in the market that could support students developing oral skills. I started looking for games that could help students to converse in the Arabic language without help from the academic staff.
"However, I did not find any game that could do that and that was how the idea to create a flash card game came about," he told Bernama, here, recently.
The game, called Hamoody Flash Card, was designed as a tool to improve command of Arabic among students, especially those from zero Arabic environment.
"During a two-and-a-half-months study carried out at the University of Sydney, Australia, generally the students involved in my experiment were those with zero knowledge of Arabic.
"However, they showed significant improvement in speaking the language within that short time," said Hamadallah, adding that the game involved three to five players where they were required to arrange the cards and then to read out the card arrangement correctly, according to the instructions given. The study also showed that in just 30 minutes, the students could memorise 20 words," he said, referring to the game costing RM15,000 to develop in 2015, including the research work.
He added that his team at USIM was in the midst of looking for interested companies to commercialise the product, as the game would be suitable for anyone wishing to learn or improve their grasp of Arabic.
The USIM-developed product won a gold medal at the International Invention, Innovation and Technology Exhibition 2017 (ITEX) in Kuala Lumpur on May 11, which saw the participation of over 1,000 researchers from 22 countries including China, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Iraq and Vietnam. — Bernama