Comparison of children's wayfinding, using paper map and mobile navigation

ABSTRACT

The benefits of outdoor education are well known and irreplaceable. Teachers of environmental lessons frequently ask themselves what kind of cartographic support (paper maps or mobile navigators) to offer their students doing fieldwork either navigating to selected points or being engaged in the research of a selected environment. In this article, we compare the success rates of children using either a paper map or mobile navigation with respect to independence, accuracy and speed when walking (wayfinding) through an unfamiliar environment. We collected the data by observing 122 primary school students of six different schools as they individually walked through a suburban area of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The results show that the children were more independent and made fewer mistakes when using a mobile navigator than when using a paper map. They were able to use mobile navigation successfully after having received only a short (2-minute-long) demonstration, even if they had never used such a device before.

KEYWORDS:

• Paper map
• mobile navigation
• spatial orientation
• wayfinding
• school children
• unfamiliar environment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.