Abstract:

The variety of features provided by touchscreen devices is a significant incentive for them to be adopted for learning purposes. They allow students to reach the learning materials conveniently and expand the study contents beyond schools' official curriculums. This is stimulated by employing applications for educational purposes that enable learners to interact effectively with the learning material to gain motivation, reflecting their accomplishment in the targeted subject. However, some of these applications suffer from shortcomings, especially in providing appropriate user feedback. Their feedback is based on evaluating students negatively or positively without any concentration of reinforcement that can influence their confidence and motivation, affecting their performance. Also, they rely on offering a few types of feedback, negatively affecting the students' engagement level. In this paper, a touchscreen-based application has been developed by adding gamification elements to assist young students in learning Arabic letter forms. The application gives students a variety of types of feedback to allow them to enhance their motivation and achievement. A full study was conducted to evaluate the system with 25 native Arabic speakers aged between 6 to 9 and 6 Arabic language teachers. The usability evolution concentrates on the systems' learning experience, user satisfaction, students' comprehension, ease of use, engagement, and interaction. Results showed the system was effective in increasing students' engagement, interaction, and motivation. Also, teachers' feedback on the application was positive in terms of the application's ability to facilitate learning the Arabic alphabet. They emphasized that the application could enhance students' outcomes and raise their competitive spirit.

Keywords:

Touchscreen Technology, Feedback, Reinforcement, Language Learning, Gamification.