Aligning technological and pedagogical considerations: Harnessing touch-technology to enhance opportunities for collaborative gameplay and reciprocal teaching in NZ early education
Introduction
The New Zealand Ministry of Education’s Te Whāriki (curriculum) framework for early childhood education aims to provide a mix of teacher and child-led learning [1], [2]. A non-prescriptive curriculum allows for broad and rich early years teaching and learning experiences, with teachers responsive to devising engaging activities that are aligned with children’s diverse interests (e.g. dinosaurs, vehicles, robots, birds) with the related content knowledge (e.g. number, measurement, shape, alphabet). However, such spontaneity presents an on-going challenge for teachers. For example, in a teacher-led classroom setting, the teacher is driving the choice of activities and related learning processes for the entire class. Conversely, in a child-led learning environment such as that in NZ ECE, children are free to play individually or in groups and it is the teacher’s role to notice what activity the child is engaged in and create opportunities for learning in that activity. For example, if a group of children are playing with a board game such as Bingo (see Fig. 1) the teacher will join the group and will ask questions related to the game such as “what colour is that castle?” while also encouraging the completion of the activity.
Herein lies the challenge for the teachers, they must constantly recognize opportunities for learning within the scope of each child’s interest at a given time. The main aim of our study was to design and develop a software solution to address and resolve this challenge in the domain of early childhood education (ECE). The specific goals of our study were to better understand different aspects and challenges of the problem domain, design and develop an engaging software solution that would preserve the principles of reciprocal teaching and support collaborative gameplay among teachers and children as widely adopted and practiced in New Zealand.
A strong criticism of child–computer interaction software solutions is the inattention to studying them in real-life contexts [3] and to aligning technological and pedagogical considerations [4], [5]. Our study acknowledges these as imperative steps in designing not just usable, but useful, software solutions. To this end, we conducted a multi-disciplinary research and development study which leveraged from the joint participation and contributions of software engineering expert and workers (principal investigator/supervisor and students), practitioners (teachers), users (children and teachers), and domain experts (ECE expert and early childhood psychology expert) to achieve its goals. We employed a combination of Action research [6], [7], [8] as the overall research framework, elements of User-Centered (for evaluation by end-users) and Participatory Design (for collaborative design with inputs from teachers and education/psychology experts) [9], [10] as the design frameworks, and Scrum software development [7], [11] as the software development framework. Using Action Research, we collected initial requirements through observations of child–teacher interactions at an ECE center. We designed and developed the software solution in an iterative and incremental manner in close collaboration with the end-users and experts using the User-Centered Design and Participatory Design approaches and Scrum software development respectively. Finally, we evaluated the software in three phases and made a number of refinements in response to the results and analysis. In this paper, we present the design, implementation and results of our multi-disciplinary study along with implications for research and practice.
Section snippets
Related works
Our project combines aspects of three areas that have a strong influence in ECE today: curriculum and pedagogy, and early childhood socio-cognitive development, and more recently, child–computer interaction. In the following subsections, we discuss some of the previous work in each of these areas as they relate to our study.
Research and development
Our project was both evolutionary as it involved discovering the needs of the practitioners and users as we developed the system, and participatory as we needed to work in close collaboration with practitioners and domain experts. Considering these aspects, we designed our research and development methodology as a combination of Action Research [6], [7], [8] as the overall research framework, elements of User-Centered (for evaluation by end-users) and Participatory Design (for collaborative
Interface and interaction design
Considerable time was invested in learning about effective Natural User Interface design. Several aspects need to be especially accounted for when designing for Child–Computer Interaction (CCI). For example, when laying out touch surfaces, the recommendation minimum size for touch items is at least 15 mm squared with 5 mm spacing [48]. For multi-user touch environments, it is further recommended to avoid one user’s actions shifting the view of another user [48]. Furthermore, only gestures
Functional testing and informal feedback
Software engineering expert and workers (supervisor and students) performed the earliest testing phase to evaluate both internal quality and external functionalities. The testing was primarily done to prepare the application for future usability evaluations with participants (teachers and children). A number of refinements were made to address the issues which arose during internal evaluations. For example, we discovered situations where the some question-images came up in the central area that
Results and key findings
All evaluation sessions were conducted by two software engineering workers and at least one of the experts. Notes were taken during observations. Video recordings of the sessions were later analyzed in-depth by the three experts (software engineering, early childhood education, and psychology) separately first, and then discussed together. We used thematic analysis and open coding i.e. we specifically sought evidence of reciprocal teaching and collaboration, while remaining open to other
Discussion
Here we discuss some interesting implications of our study and findings as they apply to the areas of early childhood education, early cognition and psychology, and child–computer interaction.
Conclusion
Our study acknowledges the importance of aligning technological and pedagogical considerations and of studying real-life contexts as imperative steps in designing not just usable, but useful software solutions. We conducted a multi-disciplinary study by leveraging the joint participation of software engineers, practitioners, users, and domain experts. Our choice of research and development methodology was a combination of Action Research as a research framework, elements of User-Centered and
Acknowledgments
We thank the manager, teachers and children of the early childhood education center who participated in our research for their enthusiasm and support. We also thank all technicians who helped move the PixelSense table to the ECE center for evaluations.
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