App2five

2019

Rediseñando apps educativas de calidad dirigidas a la primera infancia

The App2five project promotes the study of the natural interaction between young children and interactive applications to enhance the quality of digital resources for learning in early childhood.

Research indicates that the quality of digital resources for early childhood education should be related to the level of accessibility and appropriateness to the age of its content and design. However, a heuristic analysis of educational applications for children under eight years showed that the content and interactive design does not take into account the constant evolutionary change in the development of young children.

The starting hypothesis of App2five is that the set of these limits and errors of design and content is an obstacle to the interaction and understanding of the game. Consequently, this set limits the process of learning enhanced by technology because in this case the problem is not in the use of these tools, but in the tools themselves.

The project’s aim is to explore the interaction and spontaneous behavior of three- and four-year-old children with 25 educational apps for mobile devices (iPad). During the project, it has been observed that the learning potential of an educational digital resource depends on its appropriateness to the age and development of the child, and that errors in the design of apps can affect the opportunity to learn with technology.

A total of 622 child-app interactions were recorded. In each interaction, play time, participants’ evaluation of the game, emotional expression, attention, language, comprehension and game achievement were analyzed.

Audiovisual data were collected, processed, coded (manually and automatically using machine learning), visualized in a multi-panel format and then coded and analyzed. For this study, a device created for the project called “APP2five Mirror Box” was used to record the subjects during their interaction with the apps through mirrors, in order to avoid surrounding them with cables and tripods.