'Hanjamaru', a game currently in development by NHN and EduFlo, grabbed attention from the beginning of the development. Pedagogists who study Chinese characters and education psychologists from Harvard University have participated in the development process, and the game's education effect has been proved through experiments done in Psychology department of Seoul National University.
'Hanjamaru' was intended to let the users be interested in studying Chinese characters through audio-visual teaching system. 'Hanjamaru' enabled this by combining the education method with battle, which is the basic element of MMORPG.
Also, the influences that changes of various factors, such as the size, speed or aggression of monsters and appearance of items during the game, cause on users' gaze were studied in terms of educational psychology and cognitive psychology, and the results were applied in 'Hanjamaru'.
26,000 users in total participated in the final close-beta test, which was held for two weeks in January 2009, and testers learned 13 Chinese characters per hour in average. Especially, 78% of young (age of 10 or lower) participants' ability in Chinese have increased, which indicates educational effect of'Hanjamaru'.
Kwon Su Yeon (43, office worker), a parent who tried out Hanjamaru with her child, said "It seems Hanjamaru brings interest to the users, and leads to natural education by going through repetitive routine. I hope it will be a nice teaching method for children to learn Chinese characters while having fun."
Currently, Hanjamaru only supports Korean-based Chinese characters, but the global version which will support Japanese-based Chinese characters and Simplified Chinese characters will be published in 2009.
Official Website : www.hanjamaru.com
Type : Edutainment(Educational game)
Target Users : 7~13
Minimum requirements : CPU Celeron 1Ghz, Memory 512 MB, GeForce MX440
Recommended requirements : CPU Pentium 4 2.0 Ghz, Memory 1GB, GeForce 6200 or better
Published Year : 2009
Supported OS : Window XP, 2000 , Vista Supported (DirectX 9.0c or higher version)