Curious Learning

How do children interact with a platform for self-guided literacy learning?

2017
MIT Media Lab
USA, Ethiopia
#HCI
︎ Completed

Motivation

Addressing functional non-literacy on a global scale remains a significant challenge. Currently, 57 million children lack access to schools, and an additional 100 million children attend schools that are inadequate. Can children acquire reading skills in self-directed environments in order to bridge this gap. Along with hard-working teachers making progress on the ground, technology offers an opportunity to support this work by providing continuous instruction and reinforcement to engage the various brain systems involved in literacy development. As children increasingly engage with these technologies, it becomes essential to understand how they explore them and utilize them. The Curious Learning Project offers a suite of curated apps for child self-driven literacy learning purposes, offered through a tablet interface.

Picture of children in Wolonchete, Ethiopia learning with books and tablets in a library

What we did

We ran a cross-cultural analysis of data collected from two of the Curious Learning deployments, one in Wolenchete, Ethiopia and another in Roanoke, AL, USA. The data was collected using the Funf Open Sensing Framework running on the tablets used by children. Our analysis contributes understanding of how children independently explore literacy apps across different time-windows, how they develop preferences for certain apps, and how their usage changes over time. These results can be leveraged to design personalized, adaptive interfaces that dynamically respond to how children use and learn with these platforms over time.