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TECHNOLOGY AND CODE article

Front. Educ.

Sec. Assessment, Testing and Applied Measurement

Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1623948

Game-Learning: A Tangible RFID-Based Gamified System Integrating Pictophonics and Reinforcement Learning to Accelerate Early Grapheme-Phoneme Acquisition

Provisionally accepted
Cesar  GuevaraCesar Guevara1,2*Diego  Bonilla-JuradoDiego Bonilla-Jurado2
  • 1Cunef Universidad, Madrid, Spain
  • 2Instituto Superior Tecnológico España, Ambato, Ecuador

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Reading proficiency is a cornerstone of children's cognitive and emotional development, fostering both knowledge acquisition and intrinsic enjoyment. To transform early literacy into an engaging, playful experience, we introduce Game-Learning, a tangible educational prototype that merges pictophonic instruction, gamification, and operant reinforcement within an RFID-enabled toy. Game-Learning guides primary-age learners through multisensory grapheme-phoneme associations, pairing physical letter cards with interactive audiovisual feedback and reward mechanisms. We evaluated the platform in a 30-week quasi-experimental study involving 649 five-to seven-year-olds across 18 schools in Costa Rica (n = 311) and Ecuador (n = 338). Participants were randomly assigned to experimental (Game-Learning) or control (standard phonics instruction) groups. Pre-and post-tests assessed phonological awareness via a pictophonic reading protocol in Costa Rica and the Phonological Awareness Evaluation Test in Ecuador. During the intervention phase, experimental students used the Game-Learning system as part of their regular literacy lessons. Children in the experimental cohorts demonstrated significantly greater gains in both syllabic decoding (consonant-vowel combinations) and phonemic decoding (identification of single-letter sounds) compared to controls. By the post-test, over 85% of Game-Learning users reached age-appropriate mastery levelsmore than double the improvement seen in the control groups-confirming the tool's effectiveness as a reinforcement resource in both formal and informal learning environments.

Keywords: phonological awareness, pictophonic method, grapheme-phoneme mapping, Gamification, reinforcement learning

Received: 06 May 2025; Accepted: 05 Aug 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Guevara and Bonilla-Jurado. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Cesar Guevara, Cunef Universidad, Madrid, Spain

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