Mobile Applications And Tools Have Been Developed To Augment Learning For Kids Education

Mobile Applications And Tools Have Been Developed To Augment Learning For Kids Education

General Words:

Children have always loved running around, whether chasing one another through a shopping mall, darting along a beach, or playing hide and seek in the woods. Nowadays, with a selection of mobile technologies stuffed in their pockets or around their necks, they can do more than simply enjoy the moment. With a digital camera or an iPod at the ready, they can take pictures or record sounds they encounter during their outdoor pursuits. They can tag these artistic creations with comments and other personal details and then upload them to Facebook or another social Website to share them with their friends, teachers, or family. 

Description:

Another creative development is a digital necklace that children can wear as part of a simulation game in which they each pretend to be a virus. As the children move around a physical space, they try to avoid or come into contact with each other, mimicking the way viruses spread a common cold. The sensors on their necklaces do the spreading, the outcome of which is depicted on a computer display. The contacts made by the viruses appear as a brightly colored pattern that children can analyze and through which they can trace their own spreading trajectories. These are just a few examples of ways in which the new generation of mobile technologies is changing the way children learn. 

Not only is mobile learning highly engaging, it also provides children with novel ways of relating their physical experiences to abstract knowledge, from running around a playground to understanding what a carbon footprint is. These innovative forms of physical digital switching are thought to lead to a more in-depth understanding of a topic. They also increase children’s opportunities to make connections between their observations and ideas that can help them grasp difficult concepts. But how do mobile learning applications compare with PC-based, educational software programs that are now commonly used in schools to teach subjects such as math, language arts, or science? 

An important difference is the way fixed and mobile computers are used. PCs are deskbound and ideally suited to individual or pairs of children sitting in front of a computer screen, focusing their attention on solving a problem or completing a set task during a lesson. Mobile technologies are handheld and ideally suited for relatively short bursts of use (such as entering and comparing data or looking up and reviewing information) while involved in fore grounded physical activities, such as exploring a forest. In other words, PCs support sedentary children working primarily on digital tasks in the classroom or home, whereas mobile technologies support embodied children engaged in a diversity of physical activities and contexts. 

An advantage of learning while mobile is that children often become more motivated and engaged than when staring at a PC while sitting still. But more significantly, mobile learning opens up many new opportunities for ways in which children can learn. What appear to be disparate activities can now be integrated over time and space. By making more connections between their emergent ideas, prior knowledge, and ongoing observations of the world, children are starting to view and understand the world differently. This development in educational technology represents a major shift in the way computers can be used to stretch children’s minds.

A number of mobile applications and tools have been developed to augment learning. We describe these here in terms of four types: 

■ Physical exercise games

 ■ Participatory simulations 

■ Field trips and visits

 ■ Content creation

Physical exercise games Mobile technologies have been incorporated into a number of physical activities to encourage children’s understanding of abstract phenomena. For example, Floor Math combines a sensor-embedded floor mat with a visual representation of the number system that appears on an adjacent screen (Scarlatos et al., 1999). When children walk up and down the squares, the corresponding numbers change on the screen. Walking the numbers is thought to make the activity more meaningful, helping children to see and understand abstract concepts in a new way (Scarlatos, 2006, p. 295). Similarly, Smart Step, developed by the same researchers, requires children to play hopscotch, skip, and count at the same time when practicing basic math skills. 

This combination of physical and mental activities is meant to hone motor skills, pattern recognition, rhythm, and coordination. Physical exercise has also been coupled with other kinds of informal learning. Spikol and Milrad (2009), for example, developed a game called Skattjakt (Treasure Hunt in Swedish) that encourages teams of teenage children to simultaneously run around a physical environment, in this case a castle located on the university campus, to solve a mystery using mobile devices. The game design was inspired by orienteering, a traditional Scandinavian running sport involving navigation. Instead of mapping the physical exercise directly to the learning of abstract concepts, it is loosely coupled to orienteering skills, such as reading maps, and learning about history and team collaboration. Cell phones present text and audio-based clues at particular times, showing where the teams are on an interactive map of the whole area. 

Teenage girls playing the game readily understood the connection between the physical exercise demanded of them  and the practice of orienting skills. For example, one girl commented: “There is a different feeling running when you have an added reason to do it.” Nintendo Wii applications are also beginning to be used for learning various physical and cognitive skills. Kahol and Smith (2008) found that playing Marble Mania improved the dexterity skills that are needed for performing surgery; Vannoni and Straulino (2007) showed that children were able to learn about force, velocity, and acceleration through using a Wii remote to measure acceleration of a swinging pendulum. All these applications use mobile technologies to bootstrap physical activities (e.g., walking, running) with learning math, physics, or other cognitive skills (e.g., orienteering).

 At the same time, if the physical exercise is designed to be strenuous, children’s health can equally benefit through the children having to run, walk, or cycle while learning. Participatory simulations A participatory simulation is a game in which sensor-based devices are worn or carried by children to enact a complex phenomenon, such as epidemiology. Each child plays the role of an element (e.g., a virus) at ground level that  they then view at bird’s-eye level to see how their individual contribution  affects the whole system (Colella, 2000). Participatory simulations have been developed to represent a number of systems and have been played out in various settings, including classrooms, museums, and playgrounds. 

They include:

 (1) dynamic systems, such as a flu epidemic; 

(2) embedded naturally occurring phenomena, such as an earthquake; and 

(3) imaginary worlds, such as a magical place.

Dynamic systems Thinking Tags was one of the earliest prototype systems that used homemade wearable computers to simulate the spread of an epidemic (Colella, 2000). Participants wore the mobile computing devices around their necks. Light- emitting diodes (LEDs) lit up on them to indicate how many people each participant had been in contact with. By pretending to be a virus, each child discovered how dynamic events changed as a consequence of his or her behavior and on this basis made real-time decisions about what to do next—for example, discover more, control, prevent, or manage the events. More recently, a genetics simulation was developed using the Thinking Tags technology to explore concepts related to genetic inheritance, such as genotype and phenotype (MacKinnon et al., 2002). 

Each tag was programmed with a specific genotype that was not initially known to the students. The students were simply told that their eye color (phenotype) was either green (dominant) or red (recessive). Their task was to meet with other tagged children and determine whether the eye color of their “virtual offspring” would be green or red by observing the pattern of red and green LEDs that lit up on meeting. Studies of students using the mobile tags showed that the technology pushed them to become involved in the simulation, resulting in much discussion. 

Thinking Tags have also been used with very young children to help them learn about dental hygiene. According to many dentists, children find it difficult to understand how eating candy and drinking sugary drinks can cause their teeth to rot. Tooth decay caused by the buildup of sugar is a difficult concept for young children to learn. Instead of being taught about dental health the traditional way, five-year-old children used Thinking Tags to experience improving or decaying dental health (Andrews et al., 2003). 

 

Conclusion:

In this context, the digital tags were used to simulate the decay process, enabling the children to experience it firsthand and then talk about it. The technology provided a much more accessible way of learning about a difficult topic. More recently, cheaper and more robust personal digital assistants (PDAs) have been used to replace the fragile and expensive tags, with similar learning benefits (Klopfer et al., 2002). The PDAs have other advantages in that children can access further information at the moment they bump into each other, and their interactions are automatically transmitted to a large public display and added to a composite visualization of all the children’s movements, representing the dynamic system being acted out in real time.

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