User-defined multimodal interaction to enhance children's number learning

Abstract

Children today are already exposed to the new technology and have experienced excellent number learning applications at an early age. Despite that, most of the children's application softwares either fail to establish the interaction design or are not child-friendly. Involving children in the design phase of any children application is therefore essential as adults or developers do not know the children’s needs and requirements. In other words, designing children's computer applications adapted to the capabilities of children is an important part of today's software development methodology. The goal of this research is to propose a new interaction technique and usability that evaluates children learning performance of numbers. The new interaction technique is designed by participatory design in which children are involved in the design process. A VisionMath interface was implemented with the user-defined multimodal interaction dialogues which was proposed to evaluate the children’s learning ability and subjective satisfaction. An evaluation with 20 participants was conducted using usability testing methods. The result shows that there is a significant difference in the number learning performance between tactile interaction and multimodal interaction. This study reveals the proposed user-defined multimodal interaction dialogue was successful in providing a new interaction technique for children’s number learning by offering alternative input modality and potentially providing a rich field of research in the future.