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by mkempe
3078 days ago
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Have you looked at Maria Montessori's pedagogy? my daughters both learned to write cursive, starting at age 2 with tracing activities (geometrical inset/outset, sandpaper letters, etc.). Having watched them interact with apps on the iPad, I think the sensorial and perceptual presence of the learning materials is very important -- apps are not a sufficient substitute. |
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I have wondered if a custom touchscreen setup could be designed to make this easier. The problem seems to me not to be something intrinsically "wrong" with screens, but that the touchscreens are too smooth if you use them with some sort of stylus, and to have too much difference between static and dynamic friction if you use your finger directly on the screen. As an adult, my handwriting gets noticeably worse on a touchscreen with a stylus, and only marginally better than my third-grader's writing when using my finger. It seems like if someone put their mind to it, a touchscreen+stylus combo could be created that would be very similar to pencil-on-paper in feel. It's even possible this could be done with a stylus and a generic overlay that could be put on any existing touchscreen (albeit possibly limited to higher quality capacitive screens).
The disadvantage is that this overlay will probably render the underlying touch screen no longer pleasant to use with a finger, and you probably want a semi-permanent adhesion so it's not going to be a thing you can easily take on and put off. (It could be experimented with but I bet it doesn't work out very well.) But still, an off-the-shelf tablet + $20 (at scale) in stylus + overlay might be able to mitigate and/or eliminate the sensory issues, while retaining the advantages that an app can bring, instant feedback primarily.
(In my opinion, the biggest thing that computers can bring to education is instant feedback, which can be mathematically shown to improve the maximum possible learning rate, and any attempt to bring computers into education that don't involve harnessing this are starting at a severe disadvantage.)