Evaluating Simultaneous Visual Instructions with Kindergarten Children on Touchscreen Devices

ABSTRACT

A myriad of educational applications using tablets and multi-touch technology for kindergarten children have been developed in the last decade. However, despite the possible benefits of using visual prompts to communicate information to kindergarteners, these visual techniques have not been fully studied yet. This article therefore investigates kindergarten children’s abilities to understand and follow several visual prompts about how to proceed and interact in a virtual 2D world. The results show that kindergarteners are able to effectively understand several visual prompts with different communication purposes despite being used simultaneously. The results also show that the use of the evaluated visual prompts to communicate data when playing reduces the number of interferences about technical nature fostering dialogues related to the learning activity guided by the instructors or caregivers. Hence, this work is a starting point for designing dialogic learning scenarios tailored to kindergarten children.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the CEIP Vicente Gaos primary school for their collaboration during the development of this study.

Notes

1. https://goo.gl/trjB2i.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and funded by the European Development Regional Fund (EDRF-FEDER) with Project TIN2014-60077-R; by VALi+d program from Conselleria d’Educació, Cultura i Esport (Generalitat Valenciana) under the fellowship ACIF/2014/214, and by the FPU program from Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport under the fellowship FPU14/00136.

Notes on contributors

Vicente Nacher

Vicente Nacher, PhD (2019, Universitat Politécnica de Valencia), MSc (2013, Universitat Politécnica de València - UPV) is a member of the FutureLab team at the ISSI research group. He obtained the Best Undergraduate Student Award in Computer Science at the UPV and the first prize in the National End-of-Career Awards by the Ministry of Education in 2012. His current research interests include multi-touch usability and collaborative systems for children.

Fernando Garcia-Sanjuan

Fernando Garcia-Sanjuan, PhD (2018, Universitat Politécnica de Valencia), MSc (2013, Universitat Politécnica de València), Eng (2012 - UPV) is a member of the Futurelab team within the Software Engineering and Information Systems research group. His current research interests include Tangible User Interfaces, Multi-Display Environments, and Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning.

Javier Jaen

Javier Jaen, PhD (2006, Universitat Politécnica de Valencia), MSc (1998, Virginia Tech), DEA (1994, INSA de Lyon) is currently an associate professor with the Laboratory of Advanced Information Systems at the Department of Computing and Information Systems. His current research interests include ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence and tabletop-based computing. He was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship and is a member of the Upsilon Pi Epsilon International Honor Society for Computing and Information Disciplines.