Game based learning for young kids

Benjamin Franklin said, “Tell me and I forget. Teach me & I remember. Involve me & I learn.’’

This remains true to this day for every stage of learning and education of kids. A child’s brain starts understanding small objects and perceiving colors as young as 3-4 months. Involving kids in creative activities from a young age can help them learn their environment better and help develop motor, sensory skills from early on. The early focus on development of motor skills can help:

• Train sensory skills to be more receptive to the environment around them,
• Draw relationship between visual sense and corresponding motor skills to help understand and repeat complex tasks,
• Catch any learning, motor skill issues early on

Each kid goes through 4 different areas of development where each area represents a different aspect of personality,

Mapping of age to different development stages [1]

This helps understand appropriate content areas for kids to focus on and also what type of learning tasks they can engage with. The learning method chosen for kids should be appropriate for their age to learn faster, eg, arranging blocks in series can be performed by kids since they are 2 years old and they get better at it with time.

To expose kids to appropriate games, there needs to be a learning path parents can follow to help understand what games could be engaging, helpful for learning and fun for kids.

There are several games which can be played with kids to work on their sensory skills. According to medical research [2],

• 9 month old baby develops depth perception and plays interactive games like peek-a-boo and pat-a-cat.
• 1 year old baby can poke with fingers, find hidden objects
• 1.5 year old baby can match pair of objects and name simple objects like brush, spoon
• From 2–3 years, kids can respond to simple directions and match objects with their uses.

However, limitations of physical play hinders developing engaging games specifically suited for age and development areas. According to ongoing research [3], use of touchscreen technology has been shown to be associated with earlier fine motor development. Digital games provide no blockers as they can be expanded to infinite game play, provide a multitude of game designs and can be developed to focus on target skill areas.

There is a need to design better learning games to guide kids from a very young age. This is how we came up with the idea of Poke-Tap & Learn. We wish to develop games for young kids to help them understand the interplay between visual and motor skills. To make the game engaging, it is important that it is intuitive for kids, have minimal distractions and a gameplay which makes kids easier to connect with. With this research and discussion with some parents, we designed our first game for kids to make learning fun, fast and feasible.

Poke presents a captivating experience where the game is set in the seaworld with colorful sea animals swimming around to expose kids to vivid imagery and colors. The game involves poking (tapping) sea animals which are swimming around in increasingly difficult swim patterns.

Game characters

This game is designed to help kids (i) differentiate between moving objects from static backgrounds, (ii) understand motion of animals, anticipate how they are going to swim and accordingly control muscle movement to tap animals, (iii) provide kids visually rich experience to help develop visual cortex.

A significant part of our brain is devoted mainly to visual processing as it provides important information about the environment without need of touch, smell. Different areas of the brain are responsible for perception of color, motion, depth. However, according to experts [4], different visual functions mature at different times and ages, hence it is important to keep track of smaller changes in kids with simple activities. Also, it becomes important to keep track of any trouble with motor skill development early on to train children as per their learning requirements. This is our motivation behind Poke, which is the first of a series of games, to help parents and kids understand the development process better and help train the fine skills early on for richer cognitive functions.

We have launched version of an iPhone app here and are looking for feedback to learn from parents about how we can design games to help them in this beautiful journey. Learn more about us at myameri.com.

Citations

[1] N. Peirce, “Digital Game-based Learning for Early Childhood A State of the Art Report,” [online] 2013. Link

[2] US National Library of Medicine, Medline Plus, Toddler Development.[online] Link

[3] Bedford, Rachael and Saez de Urabain, Irati R. and Cheung, Celeste H. M. and Karmiloff-Smith, Annette and Smith, Tim J., topic Toddlers’ Fine Motor Milestone Achievement Is Associated with Early Touchscreen Scrolling,Frontiers in Psychology. 2016. Link

[4] Farroni T, Menon E. Visual Perception and Early Brain Development. In: Tremblay RE, Boivin M, Peters RDeV, eds. Paus T, topic ed. Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development [online]. Published December 2008. Accessed August 5, 2019. Link