Hunt Letters

As the complexity of educational content increases, its delivery methods and pedagogy must

improve as well. While the efficacy of immersive environments for education and training is

well established, their use with elementary and middle schools students is negligible. Hardware

costs and long development times are two major factors impeding development of such

environments for younger students. Computing technology, specifically tools for human machine

interface development, has come a long way in the past few years. The authors are making use of

this emerging technology to develop an immersive gaming environment for teaching handwriting

to elementary school children using a tablet PC delivery system.

There has been a fair amount of research on user interface design for children (Read,

MacFalane, & Casey, 2003) (Read, MacFarlane, Gregory, 2004), error rates in text entry user

interfaces (Read, MacFarlane, & Casey, 2002), interactive teaching environments using Tablet

PC’s (Willis & Muertschin, 2004) (Koile & Singer, 2006) and using games as tools to promote

learning in and out of the classroom (Squire, 2005) (Aguilera & Mendiz,2003). There has been

very little research done on combining all of these elements into a tool suitable for teaching

children how to write.

A tablet PC comes equipped with a touch screen that is designed to work with a pen input

device known as a stylus. Students can use the stylus to perform all user functions associated

with an ordinary mouse, but more importantly, the Tablet PC allows students to use the stylus to

write directly on the PC display screen. Interacting directly with the PC display screen provides

users with an environment that is very easy to use. Studies suggest that young children may have

problems using the standard QWERTY keyboard as a writing composition tool. There is some

evidence that suggests children may write more easily using a Tablet PC stylus than by typing on

a PC keyboard.

Some teachers feel that computer games can motivate students to maintain their attention

on the goals of particular learning activities. Video games can teach

hand-eye coordination, spatial relationships, and encourage exploratory experiences. Immersion

in simulated environments has increased learning speed and retention for some tasks. Video

games can engage players for two or more hours, yet these same students may lose interest in

classroom activities after only fifteen minutes(Michael & Chen, 2006).

Many people feel that games may enhance the classroom environment by allowing the

teacher to play a less dominate role and not being forced to serve as the sole judge of student

performance. This allows teachers to assume a coaching role and

guide students during learning tasks. Games can be a powerful and pervasive way to take

learning outside the classroom.

When playing a computer game, children may notice the multimedia content in the game,

have fun interacting with game elements, and observe how easy some things are to learn (Druin,

1999). There are several interface design issues that need to be addressed when creating game

environments for children. Some of these include: creating consistent and predictable user

dialogs, offering informative feedback, providing simple error handling, and reducing the user’s

short term memory load (Read et. al., 2004). Dealing with non-readers requires the use of audio

and unambiguous video feedback and user guidance.

Children learn to write at different rates, in different ways, and with different capacities

(Thurber, 1986). This makes it difficult to teach handwriting in a typical single teacher

classroom. One mechanism for helping to monitor an individual student’s progress in classroom

setting might be to introduce intelligent tutoring system to guide the delivery of the necessary

instructional activities. Intelligent tutoring systems go beyond the limitations of traditional

computer-based training systems.