Character Alive: Designing and Evaluating a Tangible System to Support Children’s Chinese Radical and Character Learning

Abstract

Learning to read Chinese characters poses a considerable challenge for children, particularly those with dyslexia. We designed a tangible system, named Character Alive, to assist children aged 5 to 7 in mastering Chinese radicals and characters. The system employs animations and color cues to clarify the concepts of radicals and morphemes. It also incorporates physical radical cards that work in synergy with an artificial intelligence module to facilitate stroke tracing and character composition. We conducted a two-week within-group study involving 20 six-year-old children who used both our tangible system and an equivalent multitouch version to learn Chinese radicals and characters. The results showed that both systems significantly improved the children’s accuracy in character reading and composition. However, our tangible design outperformed the multitouch variant by increasing children’s learning motivation, enabling hands-on actions, and promoting a diverse range of beneficial learning strategies. We discuss the design implications for creating effective tangible systems to facilitate Chinese language acquisition among children.

Keywords:

• Tangible system
• Chinese characters and radicals
• children
• dyslexia
• design
• evaluation

Acknowledgments

We thank all the experts who helped to review our system and all the teachers and children in the Kindergarten of Communication University of China who participated in our study. We want to give special thanks to the teachers of Hong Chen, Rui Qin, and Aoxue He for helping to coordinate the experiment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data is available based upon requests. Please contact the corresponding author.

All the appendices (Appendix A: Character List for Each Participant, Appendix B: Teaching Protocol, Appendix C: Semi-Structured Observation Sheet) can be accessed from https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10Etb7Ho7bKbpLfnjPnJEH6b6rC_mcG28?usp=drive_link.

Notes

1 Chinese can be written using both traditional and simplified characters, and it has various spoken dialects such as Mandarin, Cantonese and others. Our study focuses on simplified characters and Mandarin, as these are the forms of Chinese that all children are required to learn in school, according to the policies set by Ministry of Education of China.

2 The ability to manipulate sounds in speech (Liu et al., 2013).

3 The ability to identify items such as colors as quickly as they can (McBride et al., 2018).

4 The understanding of the conventions used in the Chinese orthographic system, such as stroke sequences and radical positions (Zhang et al., 2023).

5 Awareness of and access to morphemes, the basic semantic units in characters and words (Shu et al., 2006).

6 The prototype video could be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM0qYwpKOQg

7 In the paper, the term “at-risk children” refers to the children who, while not formally diagnosed as Chinese dyslexia, exhibit symptoms or characteristics associated with reading and writing difficulties.

8 https://www.ihuman.com/shizi/

9 https://www.maitianshizi.com/

10 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/funchar/id6450018424

11 In the reading test, the research facilitator pointed to specific characters or radicals and asked the child to read them aloud. In the recognition test, the facilitator pronounced the characters or radicals and asked the child to identify and point them out on the paper.

12 The post-reading tests were identical to the pretests. For the character-composition task, the facilitator read out a character and asked the child to construct it using our physical radical cards.

13 Our data consists of continuous dependent variables and correlated group independent variables. The distribution of differences between groups does not meet the assumption of normality, making the paired-samples t-test unsuitable. The Wilcoxon test was applied to some data with symmetric distributions, while the Sign Test was employed for remaining data that did not meet the assumptions of the Wilcoxon test.

14 Due to school absences, posttest data for three participants were unavailable. Therefore, we only analyzed the learning gains of the remaining 17 participants.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Social Science Fund of China under grant [22BG137] and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [CUC23GZ006].

Notes on contributors

Min Fan

Min Fan is a professor in the School of Animation and Digital Arts at the Communication University of China. Her research focuses on the design and evaluation of AI-based technologies for supporting the cognitive and social-emotional learning for typical and at-risk children.

Yichen Wu

Yichen Wu is an undergraduate student majoring in Digital Media Technology at the Communication University of China. His recent research focus is on designing intelligent interactive products for children with learning disabilities, particularly in Chinese character learning. He is also interested in exploring serious games and gamification.

Jianyu Fan

Jianyu Fan obtained his Ph.D. at Metacreation Lab, Simon Fraser University. His research lies in the field of Affective Computing, Human-Computer Interaction, and Computational Creativity conducting studies aimed at endowing machines with creative autonomous behavior. In particular, he focuses on generative systems for music and videos.

Xinyue Cui

Xinyue Cui is a graduate of the Communication University of China majoring in Digital Media Arts. Her research focuses on AI and human interaction, especially the application of AI in education and game design.

Sitong Lin

Sitong Lin is a graduate student in Digital Media Arts at the Communication University of China. He is deeply interested in researching and designing for children with special educational needs. His primary focus is on integrating AI technology with children’s product design.