Game-based learning mobile-app for teaching the binary numeral system

The binary numeral system is a fundamental and necessary knowledge for people who work within the computer related professional fields such as IT and Engineering. Almost every technological device that we use in our daily life today is operating on the binary numeral system because of its straightforward implementation in the digital electronic circuitry using logic gates. However, many beginners are facing difficulties in learning the binary numeral system, such as misunderstanding the concept, having insufficient time to practice their understanding or having difficulty in grasping the arithmetic procedures. With the fast development of digital devices, people nowadays are learning through interactive and personalized game-plays. Compared to traditional learning, game-based learning (GBL) creates a more attractive channel for knowledge transfer, ensuring more effective learning outcome. This study aims to design a GBL mobile-app for binary numeral system for beginners. The proposed mobile-app adopts James Paul Gee's 16 principles of GBL design methodology and follows the optimal GBL design factors provided by Olsson and Mozelius (2017). Four difficulty levels (beginner, intermediate, expert, and hidden) are available, with the random question generator matching the specific difficulty level. The difficulty level will increase gradually for three basic game modes (decimal, octal, and hexadecimal). The questions can be formulated into two-way conversions, with arithmetic operations covering addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Instead of asking users to input the binary number, the inversed questions will ask users to input the decimal number for the given binary number. There were a total of 37 responses collected from the beta testing. The survey questions were divided into three sections, namely the questions on the principles for GBL (12 questions), the questions on user experience (6 questions), and the questions on system integrity (5 questions). Majority of the participants gave positive feedback on the application of the principles for GBL design into the game development and on system integrity. They were satisfied with the user experience. 30 participants felt that the GBL approach is most suitable for learning Mathematics. In addition, the experiment also found that 46% of the participants preferred a better visual experience among other modalities from the VARK model