Sketch-Based Educational Games: "Drawing" Kids Away form Traditional Interfaces

Brandon Paulson, Brian Eoff, Aaron Wolin, Joshua Johnston, and Tracy Hammond

Summary

The authors present a number of sketch-based education games. The goal is to improve children's ability to learn by providing them with kinesthetic and tactile learning environments. The games are:

• APPLES - an animated planetary physics simulation that lets children experiment with how gravity, motion, and collisions effect planets.
• Simon Says "Sketch!" - a memory game for examining how stimulus change recall is affected if participants are able to specify game piece positions.
  
• Go (Sketch-a) Fish - a sketch-based memory card game.
• Sketch-based Geography Tools - initial setup is to help children learn each U.S. state by having them find and mark states on a map. Future expansion of this system is possible.
  
• Learn Your Shapes! - a tool to teach children shapes by allowing them to sketch them.
• Sentence Diagramming - a tool to help children in understanding sentence structure by providing feedback when diagramming the parts of a sentence.

A preliminary evaluation has been done using graduate students. A formal evaluation for the work is pending IRB approval.

Discussion

There are obvious advantages to helping children learn through kinesthetic and tactile methods. It will be interesting to see the final results of the evaluation following IRB approval, which while I've never had to get IRB approval for participants under the age of 18, I know is not something they give out easily.