Using touchscreen tablets to help young children learn to tell time

Problem Definition

Goal

Investigating the impact of touchscreens on children’s learning outcomes with two main questions:

Whether using a touchscreen was helpful in teaching children to tell time;
To what extent young children could transfer what they had learned on the touchscreen to another media.

Actually, it is extremely important for us determine a proper experience materials to test children's learning results.

The problems of material

1. Easy-understanding for target participants.
2. The learning outcomes can be tested through quantitative methods.
3. Participants could not learn it from teachers or other sources during the period of testing.
4. The learning tools can be presented in three types: paper, touchscreen and toy.

How to solve the problems?

Skills

Usability testing, Interview, Brainstorm, Developmental Psychology theories, Literature review, Experimental design

We chose the initial target participants based on theories in development psychology. We first conducted literature review about children' learning characteristics. According to the review, we narrowed our options to three choices, consisting of mathematics, literacy and clock reading. Then we brainstormed together and generated a bunch of possible ideas. To select the best idea, we did face-to-face interviews with teachers and students in the kindergarten. Three different subjects - mathematics, Chinese, science were concluded according to interviews among teachers.

Participants answered dozens of questions and we calculated the accuracy to get quantitative outcomes. They need to finish printed time reading test on paper as pre-test. Then participants would complete pro-test through different tools to test the transfer effect.

Teachers always teach the knowledge of telling time once a year. Parents also usually ignore teaching children on telling time.

Toy clocks are necessity used as teaching tools. The “Learning Time” App can also satisfy our needs on function of teaching to tell time. Thus, telling time is a perfect task to present among different media fulfilling the final requirement.

Picture from Ref. Using Touchscreen Tablets to Help Young Children Learn to Tell Time.

Key Findings

Results

Touchscreen itself could provide support for young children’s learning.
Children could transfer what they had learned on an iPad touchscreen to other media. However, children tested with the paper drawing underperformed those tested with the other two media.

My contribution

I contributed ideas during the process of brainstorm and materials selecting.
I helped our team to choose children at age of six as our interviewees according to my comparison of knowledge infrastructure for children of different age groups. I also sought advices from preschool teachers. This helps me acquire the practical skills to make children follow rules as I learn to handle many naughty children.
Finally I learned the spirit that no matter what the problems were, just trying our best to use existing knowledge and extend related views to solve it.

Nothing in the world is difficult for one who sets his mind into it!