Exploring Learners' Perceptions of the Use of Digital Letter Games for Language Learning: The Case of Magic Word

In this paper, we present two versions of a learning game developed respectively at the Grenoble Alpes and Bologna University. This research focuses on a digital game aimed at favouring the learners' "playful attitude" and harnessing it towards "accuracy" aspects of language learning (lexicon and morphology, here). The game, presently available for English, French and Italian, could be described as a letter game stemming from the archetypal example of Turoff's Boggle. Avatars of this game genre both exist as commercial off the shelf games and as learning games. We explain in this paper how our two versions respectively tackle two different aspects of language learning. We conducted an experiment in which all students tried both versions to study their perceptions of both games contrastively in order to prepare for the development of subsequent versions of the game. [For the complete volume of short papers, see ED572005.]