Z-APPING

2017

Entorno de aprendizaje para niños y niñas de 18 meses a 5 años con APPs educativas de calidad

The aim of this project is to evaluate how young children use and interact with mobile applications by observing the reactions and behaviour of four-year-old children while spontanusly interacting with fifteen educational apps.

A multimodal non-intrusive research procedure was applied to twelve participants in a kindergarten in Brazil. Structured observations and qualitative field notes were employed to assess understanding of the game and achievement, emotions, level of involvement, private speech and speech to the researcher through the child’s facial expressions, behaviour and verbalizations.

This work was developed in the framework of the Programa de Pós-graduação em Educação at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (Brazil). The families of the participants were asked to complete a brief face-to-face questionnaire specifically designed for this research. Principal Component Analysis exposes three dimensions of young children’s interactions with educational apps: game access, active engagement with the activities, and the social speech that is generated from playing the game. The field notes also allowed specific features of the app to be identified that may complicate or support the children’s interactions.

The study offers an operational definition of children’s interactions with digital devices in educational contexts that could support the future evidence-based design and an assessment of digital resources for effective game-based learning in early childhood.