6/20/2023 0 Comments Multitouch screens senseSince we are interested in analyzing particular types of multi-touch interactions with respect to aspects of number-sense that they may foster, two important problems that we need to address are: 1) what this type of knowledge for very young children can look like, and 2) how it can be “observed”. We will focus on the experiences of a group of preschool children in contexts of this second type. There are notable exceptions, such as software developed by Sinclair and Jackiw ( 2011) or by Ladel and Kortenkamp ( 2009, 2011) that propose mostly open-ended interactions with virtual manipulatives, and some other apps that, even offering only closed conversing-type interactions (Sedig and Sumner 2006), are designed to foster children’s perception of numerosity Footnote 1 (from 1 to 10) and of particular ways of using fingers to represent such numerosities (Sinclair and Baccaglini-Frank 2015). So typical apps of this nature do not take advantage of many of the new opportunities offered by multi-touch technology, and in particular by the affordance of recognizing a variety of touch gestures, possibly executed simultaneously. In general, input is expected as a choice among possible “answers”, or as a “typing in” of the answer (the finger is used to tap on virtual keys). However, most of these apps are presented in the form of games or quizzes, proposed as closed interactions, mostly designed for repeating number facts, and that only support input from a single-finger touch, as if it were the old fashioned mouse click, drag, or single taps on the keyboard. Tablets, and in particular iPads, have appropriate dimensions for fostering young children’s touch-interactions, and there is a great variety of apps developed for such technologies’ operating systems. ![]() In this article we focus on the educational potential offered by certain software applications (apps) that exploit multi-touch affordances for fostering preschoolers’ (age 4–5) development of number-sense. Of course these new possibilities for software can, and may we add, should, have implications for educators, be they teachers, parents, researchers, or software designers. These devices recognize as different inputs a variety of single-finger and multi-finger touch gestures as well as voice inputs (when speech recognition software is installed). In particular, the mouse and keyboard, once essential interfaces, are no longer necessary for interacting with software: the advent of interactive whiteboards, touch tables, tablets, and smartphones has offered the possibility of acting directly on screens through pens or simply fingers. ![]() Recent advances in the fields of technology and computer science have opened a great number of possibilities in terms of the types of interactions that users can have with the various available devices. The specific issue addressed and the perspective adopted position this study at the crossroads between different research fields. The study is based on the analysis of children’s interactions with these apps in the context of a sequence of activities centered on the use of the iPad, carried out in a public preschool in Northern Italy. ![]() Our specific research goal is to analyze the multi-touch potential of two apps for fostering preschoolers’ development of those aspects of number sense. We introduce theoretical elements derived from recent research in developmental and cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and mathematics education, that concur in defining the aspects of number sense that we will be investigating in relation to specific multi-touch interactions. This article focuses on the educational potential offered by certain software applications (apps) that exploit affordances of multi-touch devices for fostering preschoolers’ development of number-sense. The technology-enhanced development of very young children’s mathematical abilities, apart from some notable exceptions, does not seem to have yet raised a lot of interest within the mathematics education community.
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