At 7 o?clock in the morning, children from a rural village in the northern Indian province of Uttar Pradesh begin their one-hour walk to school. Amit, an upper-caste boy, will find his way to one of the more expensive schools in the region, while his sister Gauri heads to one that costs her family much less. *

In contrast, lower-caste boys will attend the least expensive schools, while many of their sisters will not attend at all. Dr. Matthew Kam, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, shadows the children with other researchers, trying to get a sense of the daily rhythms and schedules of these rural children. ?We need to understand the social fault lines such as gender and caste, to see how they interact with each other and with the technology.?

In 2008, Kam earned his PhD in computer science with a minor in education, and has spent the last five years creating educational gaming software for mobile phones. His project, Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies (MILLEE), is a recipient of a 2007 HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning grant. Last year, he visited India with a team of graduate and undergraduate researchers to observe the natural ways that rural students use and share their family?s cellphones. Because these children experience interrupted schooling?or in some cases no schooling at all?Kam and his colleagues wanted to explore creative ways to deliver game-based learning outside traditional school environments.

?Not everyone in India has a computer, but many families have cellphones,? says Kam, noting that this is true for both the upper- and lower-caste families whom his team interacted with. ?In this village, which is in the mango belt, the majority of villagers are affluent by rural standards.? Even so, the demands of mango farming, the very thing that creates affluence for the families, can also make it difficult for the children to receive their schooling.

Informal learning, explains Kam, must be understood in the context of cultural forces that shape the children?s daily and seasonal activities. With that in mind, he and fellow researchers set out to follow 45 children of different ages, genders and castes during one of the group?s recent visits to Uttar Pradesh.

?Deepti Chittamuru was the lead graduate student researcher for that field study. She grew up in a rural Indian village before she became a social worker in India for seven years. We were fortunate to have her, to have someone who is intimately familiar with the norms of rural Indian life and could establish trust with the families.? Chittamuru, who speaks five of the official languages of India including Hindi, led the recent fieldwork in an effort to understand the village?s deeper social fabric.

What Chittamuru, Kam and others learned was important. ?In India, for example, boys receive preferential treatment from their parents, and we saw this dynamic play out with the phones. So even if older girls have the cellphone first, when their younger brother comes along, they must let him use it.? For Kam and his team, that meant taking the game prototypes back to the lab, to rethink designs that encourage collaboration between the genders, ensuring that the children worked together in order to advance to higher levels of the game.

This immersive fieldwork is at the heart of MILLEE, designing as a community of users instead of designing for an end-user community. Some undergraduate computer science students who worked on the project were surprised when a year went by and they had not written any computer code, focusing instead on observing and understanding the collaborative social processes between them, the Indian children, their families and others in the community.

Over the past five years, the MILLEE team has done nine field studies in India, each one focused on the ways Indian children use smartphone technology. In 2005, Kam was among ten co-authors who wrote The Case for Technology in Developing Regions, which pointed out one of the most salient facts about the digital divide, ?There has been little work on how technology needs in developing regions differ from those of industrialized nations.?

MILLEE?s game-based mobile-phone learning uses an approach that typifies bottom-up smart design: visit the villages, forge relationships, build trust, and listen. Then design and modify the technology, basing it on the traditional games that village children play as opposed to copying contemporary Western digital games. Participating in the design helps the children to ground the game-based learning programs in their culture, making the games not only more relevant, but more effective. It is this kind of participatory learning that makes the technology work for them.

For the kids in Uttar Pradesh, Kam and his team are modifying their cellphone games to work best during the children?s free time. When the students walk to school, the games are based on audio to help them memorize and recite English vocabulary; for times when the kids are at home or keeping watch in the mango groves, the games have both audio and visual components. All of the games are designed around cultural references familiar to the children.

Cellphones have eclipsed computers, both desktop and laptop, as the most promising technology in emerging economies such as India, China and Africa, something that MILLEE embraced from its founding in 2004. In 2007, Businessweek writer Bruce Nussbaum reported that the One Laptop Per Child initiative should, after much fanfare, be called a failure, ?Cell phones are far more popular as the means to connect to the net in much of the Third World,? wrote Nussbaum, ?and cellphone-type devices rather than cute little laptops might have made much more sense.?

Given the high adoption rates for cellphones in most of the developing world, programs like MILLEE are poised to make a difference in global literacy rates, one phone at a time.