Abstract:

Writing is one of the most complex tasks and challenging skill for children to learn. By its nature, writing involving motor and critical-thinking skills. Especially handwriting is an essential skill that takes a lot of times for children's education. It can be a challenging and often arduous process for children due to developing fine-motor skills. Then tracing the letters of the alphabet can be an important step for helping children learn to write letters. Therefore, due to the rapid growth of mobile technology in a novel and innovative way, to support children learning young children are increasingly using mobile technology in early education and home setting. The use of mobile tablets in kindergarten school has also been found to increase children’s interest and engagement in learning task. Moreover, many studies suggested that mobile tablets not only make technology accessible to young children, but also suggested that tablets and applications can improve learning skill (e.g., alphabet knowledge and emergent writing). Although the impact of mobile technology in classrooms has been extensively studied, however the effect of mobile learning technology on children’s learning to write letters in term of learning efficacy has not yet been explored. For this reason, in this paper a preliminary study was conducted to explore the potential of mobile tablet technology to enhance elementary children learning to write letters by compare learning efficacy of stylus interfaced and touch based interface with traditional method that using regular pencil and paper. Learning efficacy was measured by mean of different pre-test and post-test scores. Eighteen children participated in the experiment. Their ages were from 4 to 6 years. The groups of participants were the heterogeneous level involving both weak and strong children. The performances were recorded and observed for analysis the data respect to task efficiency and usability purpose. The results showed that learning efficacy for the participant group using stylus interfaced can write more letters of alphabet than those who use touch based interface and traditional pencil and paper. From observation during the experiment, we notice that most of the children who learn to write letter by touch based interface were concentrated on control of their finger on the pre-defined letter shapes rather than how to write letters. It was also observed that time spent to complete a task when using stylus interfaced was on average shorter than those of the other two tracing methods. For instance, stylus interfaced and touch based interface provide direct feedback and instructions to the children to help improve their handwriting skills. By the way, one of the principal features of mobile learning is the flexibility for children to engage in the educational process and material anywhere, any time.

Keywords:

Mobile Learning, Tablet Computer, Effectiveness, Learning Efficacy, Writing, Children.