Mobile Intervention for Learning Indigenous African Languages—KoEde Design and Evaluation

The role of language in conveying a people’s values, norms, and beliefs is crucial, particularly today, when many indigenous languages, especially in Africa, are at risk of extinction. To reverse this trend, it is imperative to develop innovative ways to teach people, especially children, their native languages during their formative years. Advances in information and communication technologies offer opportunities to enhance pedagogical engagement. This study investigated the effectiveness of a mobile intervention designed to support children in learning Yoruba. To accomplish our objective, we designed KoEde, a gamified mobile application that supports Yoruba language learning through culturally grounded pedagogy and interactive mechanics. Following five iterative design cycles, we conducted a usability evaluation with an analytic sample of 39 participants (ages 5–30). The results which represent research participants’ perceptions reveal substantial increase in learnability and overall positive impressions, with gamification emerging as a strong motivator (M ≈ 3.98) despite heterogeneous mechanics. In contrast, text-to-speech (TTS) functionality recorded low satisfaction (M ≈ 3.30), though internal consistency was strong (α ≈ 0.77), underscoring persistent challenges in accent fidelity and naturalness. This study contributes to knowledge in three folds: (i) it offers a human-centered, pedagogically informed design for indigenous language learning, (ii) it provides empirical evidence which shows how gamification and scaffolding could mediate engagement and cognitive load, and (iii) it presents a roadmap for developing tone- and accent-aware speech technologies for low-resource languages.