|
Using mobile technologies to promote Children’s Learning
|
Posted On :
Jan-04-2012
| seen (227) times |
Article Word Count :
567
|
|
Today’s kids represent the first truly digital all time generation. Kids who can barely speak are happily tapping away on their parents’ laptops, phones. The mobile phone is their tutor, their camera, their plaything, in short their world!
|
Today’s kids represent the first truly digital all time generation. Kids who can barely speak are happily tapping away on their parents’ laptops, phones. The mobile phone is their tutor, their camera, their plaything, in short their world!
As a result, there are many possibilities of mobile devices being more broadly used for learning. There are many evidence of how these devices can help revolutionize teaching and learning. Software companies involved in mobile development are hiring interaction designers to make the applications as interactive as possible.
Speech recognition technology which is widely used in telephone call-routing and directory assistance can be tapped as a cost-effective and technically viable means to advance early childhood literacy. When coupled with effective pedagogy, voice recognition tools can provide valuable assessments that reach beyond the human capacities of the average public school classroom teacher. This emerging technology has the potential to offer real-time literacy support to every student by helping young children learn reading with the fluency needed to compete and cooperate in an increasingly complex world.
We have also come up with a series of ‘Learn language’ apps for children that help them to easily learn their mother tongue and thus connect them to their roots. But there are some important design interaction considerations to mull over while creating mobile apps for children. We would like to share them here:
Don’t try the kids patience
It is commonly known that a child has very limited attention span .Don’t let kids wait and wait before they can actually see or interact with anything fun. Waiting... is no fun. This is in particular context of splash screens that take a long time to load. A splash screen that takes more than 10 seconds to load will frustrate the kids no doubt. As an alternative, the app must try to occupy the child’s interest while the screen loads. The interaction designers can come up with novel ideas for this.
Appearance of Home page
Studies have shown that an app's home screen is generally not useful for children between one and three years of age .These children cannot read or write and do not yet know how to make the best decision when shown several options. Children this age hardly use the ‘Back’ button when wanting to restart or resume the game and invariably exit the application, and then look for its icon and launch it all over again.
This means that apps aimed at children between one and three years of age should immediately launch when they are opened, with no home screen or any other placeholder screens. The interaction designer should keep this in mind.
This changes from 3 years onwards. A plain and simple screen conceived by the visual and interaction designers should suffice for them.
Keeping it minimal
When kids interact with software, they explore and engage with anything that looks interesting. Graphical user interface components don't. Modal menu dialogs and kids don't gel. The interaction designers should always remember this while creating interactive screens for children.
Setting buttons are not recommended for children apps as children often tap them. If they are a must, it is advisable for the visual and interaction designers to design them so simple and non intrusive that if the child accidentally changes them, it will not greatly affect the app’s performance.
|
|
Article Source :
http://www.articleseen.com/Article_ Using mobile technologies to promote Children’s Learning_128550.aspx
|
Author Resource :
My name is Don Ovan and I’m an internet marketing expert. I have been sharing articles on Interaction Designers time to time.
|
Keywords :
Hire Interaction Designer, Interaction Designer for Hire,
Category :
Computers
:
Software
|
|
|
|