The first of many sub-games in Prof. Nipan Maniar’s mobile game, C-Shock, involves prancing around a basketball court trying to avoid red balls while collecting green ones. Surely, you say, that sort of computer game was trendy when disco music was cool and a mullet was something to be proud of.
Mobile lessons: Maniar’s research at the University of Portsmouth led to a game which the professor hopes will now be licensed by other universities.
But there is more to the little sequence than just 1980s style dodging and grabbing. Each red ball stands for a social evil—binge drinking and junk food—while the green ones are good habits—daily water intake and fresh fruits and vegetables. What Maniar, of the University of Portsmouth, UK, is trying to do with C-Shock is to give foreign students in the UK a fun and user-friendly way of getting to know the social norms and potential problem areas of British culture.
Much of Maniar’s inspiration for the game came from his own experiences as a foreign student. The Indian professor recounts his transition in some detail: “I came to England on 13 September 2000, and it was the first time I left my family and country. For me, it was a different world, where I had no one to guide me or talk to.”
When he spoke to us on phone from his office at the university, the professor was candid about the culture shock. The initial periods, he said, were particularly tough. “First job I did here was that of a cleaner and I still remember that morning when I walked into the building, the supervisors greeted me by saying ‘my love, my darling, my sweetheart’,” he recounted. For the graduate in math and statistics from Gujarat University, this was nothing short of scandalous. And the peck on the cheek that followed didn’t help much either.
Shocks followed upon shock. When the professor first met the staff member who had recruited him from India, he immediately touched his feet—not exactly everyday social behaviour in Portsmouth.
Maniar narrates incident after incident to make one simple point—that he still finds it difficult to drive home to critics the practicality of his game-based training approach. “It takes time to settle into a new culture. Many students think that they already know everything there is to know about a foreign culture. Students from big cities like Mumbai, for instance, might think that just because they have seen so many foreign television programmes they know exactly how the culture is here. This is completely wrong!”
Three years into his stay at Portsmouth, and after completing his masters in multimedia information systems, Maniar was weighing options for his doctoral thesis when he decided to work in the field of mobile learning. “That’s when the idea of something along the lines of C-Shock occurred to me,” explains the professor. By then, mobile phones had become ubiquitous among the student population and Maniar saw an opportunity to tap into that channel as a learning tool.