Abacus Educational Game for Primary School Children: Fun with Abacus

Abacus is an ancient mathematical instrument used for calculation. Abacus is widely used in China, Japan and Russia. With the advancement of technology, the learning of abacus has been improved from time to time, from the traditional method, to the use of computer application such as courseware, website and the latest technology is mobile application in smart phones and tablets. Abacus calculating tool is compulsory to learn by all the level one primary school students in Malaysia. However, Abacus is boring to learn as it consists of repetition practices and endless exercises. Furthermore, Abacus education in Malaysia is still using the traditional ways which required students to memorize the calculation method. Moreover, the abacus mobile game available currently in Google Play Store which targets the children only consists of addition and subtraction whereas the syllabus of abacus in the education covers addition, subtraction, multiplication as well as division. To address these problem, the aim of this project is to develop a mobile game application on abacus for all the syllabus from addition until division. The application will focus on addition, subtraction, multiplication and division up to three digits number. Besides, the objective of this project is also to identify the learning styles of children and curriculum of abacus suitable for the primary school students. In addition, the author evaluated the user acceptance on the developed mobile application at the last phase of the project development. The method used to achieve the objectives is prototyping-based methodology. The mobile game is developed using App Inventor on the Android platform. The phase of requirement gathering was done through questionnaire survey, research and literature review study on information about abacus, advantages of abacus, learning approaches and the suitable development platform for the mobile game.