Analysis of Young Children’s Technology Difficulties and Challenges in Operating and Using Educational Application in Tablet

Overview & Synopsis

Young children between 3-5 years old are in a period of high development of cognitive abilities, like language, literacy and painting. With more access to tablets, it is not only possible to include this technology in teaching curricula but they also show great promise as a learning instrument. In the aim to glean more information concerning children's cognitive development at this precious stage by using a tablet, we invited 25 young children (3-5 years old) coming from a French preschool to participate in this study. We arranged for every child to play an application on the tablet twice a week for two months and adaptively and gradually accommodated instructions to the children according to their performance. Lastly, we analyzed three typical modes of operation on the tablet: simple screen touch, gesture interaction and tilting based on gravity. We found that tilting is the most difficult part for most of the children and challenges are mainly caused by technology difficulty rather than content difficulty.