Publisher:	NHN Games
Developer:	Eduflo
Released:	13 Nov 2009
Genre	Strategy
Platform

'Hanjamaru',a game currently in development by NHN and EduFlo, grabbed attentionfrom the beginning of the development. Pedagogists who study Chinesecharacters and education psychologists from Harvard University haveparticipated in the development process, and the game's educationeffect has been proved through experiments done in Psychologydepartment of Seoul National University.

'Hanjamaru' wasintended to let the users be interested in studying Chinese charactersthrough audio-visual teaching system. 'Hanjamaru' enabled this bycombining the education method with battle, which is the basic elementof MMORPG.

Also, the influences that changes of various factors,such as the size, speed or aggression of monsters and appearance ofitems during the game, cause on users' gaze were studied in terms ofeducational psychology and cognitive psychology, and the results wereapplied in 'Hanjamaru'.

26,000 users in total participated inthe final close-beta test, which was held for two weeks in January2009, and testers learned 13 Chinese characters per hour in average.Especially, 78% of young (age of 10 or lower) participants' ability inChinese have increased, which indicates educational effectof'Hanjamaru'.

Kwon Su Yeon (43, office worker), a parent whotried out Hanjamaru with her child, said "It seems Hanjamaru bringsinterest to the users, and leads to natural education by going throughrepetitive routine. I hope it will be a nice teaching method forchildren to learn Chinese characters while having fun."

Currently,Hanjamaru only supports Korean-based Chinese characters, but the globalversion which will support Japanese-based Chinese characters andSimplified Chinese characters will be published in 2009.