Although game-based apps for memorizing words are widely used in regular life, there is little empirical evidence that it has an impact on students' academic learning. This study sought to ascertain whether English apps using mobile games would have a motivating effect on first-grade elementary school students' English word learning. For this purpose, a pretest and post-test were conducted for students. And two groups of 40 first-grade elementary school students underwent a four-week experiment. One group of students was the experimental group that learned vocabulary by using the mobile game-based app; the other was the control group, where students learned with traditional paper word lists. The conclusion is that the mobile game-based vocabulary learning app motivates students to acquire vocabulary and is more easily for students to memorize than utilizing the traditional teaching method.