Emphasis on research methods and purposes is important as these decide how research results are used and interpreted. Making methods and purposes explicit is also important because they help a research community to be built and allow this community to formally share results and facilitate knowledge transfer (Wingkvist and Ericcson 2011). In the studies conducted by Wu et al. (2012) and Vogel et al. (2006), evaluating the effectiveness of mobile learning was found to be the primary research purpose. In contrast, of the 49 studies reviewed in this research, 51 % of the researchers stated that designing a mobile system for learning was the most common research purpose. As the use of mobile devices as a pedagogical tool is relatively new, a large number of systems for using these devices for science instruction do not exist. In addition, the systems that do exist are not widely disseminated. Therefore, it is not unusual that researchers looking to explore the use of mobile devices in the teaching of science would focus their efforts on developing systems for learning