LAA: Learn the Arabic Alphabet: Integrating Gamification Elements with Touchscreen Based Application to Enhance the Understanding of the Arabic Letters Forms

Touchscreen devices provide a variety of features and engaging interaction which offer a significant incentive for them to be adopted for learning purposes. They facilitate access to educational resources at any time and broaden the study contents beyond the formal curricula of educational institutions. This is promoted by employing educational applications that stimulate learners to interact effectively with the learning material to gain motivation, influencing their accomplishments in the targeted subject. However, some applications fail to provide a variety of feedback to their stakeholders by relying on evaluating learners either negatively or positively in a simplistic manner and with a lack of reinforcement. This unsuitability and the lack of feedback can lead to a weak level of interaction and decrease students' comprehension levels. In this paper, a multi-platform touchscreen-based application has been developed by adopting gamification to support learners with limited literacy skills in acquiring the Arabic alphabet. A study was conducted on 75 native Arabic learners studying in the first and second year of elementary level in Saudi Arabia to evaluate the system's ability to increase learners’ knowledge of the Arabic alphabet. The sample was divided into three groups; experiment, and control groups (both first-year) and second-year groups. The experimental group utilized the application after taking the pre-test, while the control group interacted with the learning material traditionally with their teachers. The second-year group results assisted the study in investigating the system's ability to rapidly boost the experiment group's comprehension of the targeted subject since the second-year learners were more experienced in Arabic letters than the experiment or control groups. The results of the comparison of the pre-test and post-test showed that the experiment group overtook the control and the second-year group regarding the post-test score, which indicates the system's ability to increase learners’ knowledge level. By providing an interactive and engaging learning experience, the developed application has shown the ability to increase learners' knowledge levels significantly. These research findings have implications for educators, learners with limited literacy skills, curriculum developers, and researchers who are seeking effective tools to improve language learning outcomes.