Abstract:

Writing is one of the most important human skills to learn and communicate ideas. Children who fail to develop handwriting skills can negatively impact their future achievement. However, traditional pen-and-paper Chinese character teaching will cause heavy cognitive load to children with written disorder, making them always get frustrated and be impatient when learning Chinese characters.

With the advancement of technology, mobile devices have gradually become an indispensable part of our lives. The instant feedback and diverse teaching materials of mobile learning can help children improve their learning motivation and reduce their cognitive load. Features of mobile learning can also help children with written disorder improve their handwriting skills. However, most of the writing assistive technologies are still low-tech and focus on improving the pen-holding posture and reducing muscle burden. Children with written disorder are still unable to take advantage of mobile devices. Therefore, our team worked with speech therapists to develop an app that will be used to assist therapists in teaching children with written disorder to learn Chinese character writing. We designed this APP from diverse viewpoints and mainly based on the scaffolding theory.

This paper describes the design, development, and evaluation of this APP for children with written disorder in Taiwan. The main goal of our proposed APP is to reduce children’s cognitive load and enhance their learning motivation. To reduce the cognitive load of writing Chinese characters, we divided the writing task into several easy activities in the app, based on literature and discussions with therapists. When the target user successfully completes each task, the system will generate an immediate response to encourage the user. Based on the above concepts, this APP consists of several activities, including “Radical Type Recognition”, “Chinese Radical Puzzle”, “Copy Chinese Radical”, “Copy Chinese Character”, “Writing Chinese Character”, etc., which can guide children with written disorder to gradually learn to write Chinese characters. Besides, we hope that the interface design can meet children's preferences to reduce their fear of writing Chinese characters and enhance their motivation. For this reason, we invited 8 elementary school children to take a preference questionnaire. The results of the questionnaire helped us assure the design style of this APP interface.

To understand whether or not every activity in this APP can meet the needs of therapists and will be helpful to children with written disorder, we invite 6 speech therapists and 2 occupational therapists to conduct the assessment by online questionnaire survey. The results show that therapists fully agree that every activity in our app can help children with writing disorder improve their writing skills; our simple interface is very friendly to children; the design style of our APP can attract children and assist therapists in therapy. In addition, we also get some suggestions from the therapists. Therefore, we will be able to improve our APP to meet the user’s actual needs and expectation based on the feedback from the assessment to build an innovative Chinese character writing assistive technology for children with written disorder in Taiwan. In the future, we will investigate the effectiveness of the app in the authentic classroom and share more of our research findings at the conference.

Keywords:

Written language disorder, Tablet APP, Chinese handwriting.