Study
Decades of research tell us that manipulating physical objects is essential to early childhood development. There is a growing use of digital technology for early childhood education. This study evaluates the use of an iPad app called Tiggly Draw. It combines the use of physical shapes and digital technology to teach preschoolers basic shape recognition and to support creative play. The game play of the app involves children drawing with canonical shapes for (circles, squares, triangles, and stars) and a selection of features that can be dragged onto the shapes to create different designs. We had 50 three to four year olds play, with one of two versions of Tiggly Draw, for eight minutes. The control condition (app only) consisted exclusively of screen interactions with children dragging the shapes and features from on screen icons. The experimental condition (tiggly shapes) used 4 soft plastic shapes that were physically pressed on the screen to create the shapes. In both conditions, upon creating a shape the app writes and speaks the name of the shape. Sounds and animations also accompany the placement of features on the drawings. Our hypotheses were that both shape recognition and creativity would be aided by the combination of digital and physical interaction. Shape recognition was measured through a pretest/post timed trial that involved placing the 4 shapes into identical shaped holes in a plastic toy. Using a 2 x 2 ANOVA we found a significant interaction. Three year olds showed significantly greater improvement using the tiggly shapes version while four year olds showed no difference (p= .02). An analysis of the game play found that the younger children also created more shapes than the older children (p= .01). Our primary measure of divergent creativity was the number of unique features that children used in their 8 minutes of play. Here, we found a distinct advantage for the four year olds with both main effects for condition (p = .01) and an interaction (p = .001). The use of tangible tiggly shapes produced more divergent play than the app only version for four years olds.
Design Implications
The best way to have children interact with technology is to have it be multimodal. The more sense that are engaged the greater the opportunities for learning. However, age is a factor, and only so much can be taught. In theory this approach can be adopted for more complex tasks such as programing for older children. For example Osmo’s Coding Starter Kit. With adults having a physical interface that combines with their digital interface might enhance productivity. Perhaps ‘potentially’ tangible affordances are better than simply visual ones.