March 2005 — Features
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Are PDAs Pedagogically Feasible for Young Children?
The teacher, who has more than 20 years of experience in the early grades and is an advocate for computer technologies, participated in two interview sessions. Differences and similarities among the children are compared and contrasted in relation to our guiding questions mentioned earlier. Findings regarding these guiding questions were triangulated by data provided by the teacher interviews.
Findings
Children’s manipulation of a stylus and PDA form. When the researcher asked, “If you wanted to learn more about one of those pictures [on the PDA], what do you think you would do?” Three of the four children responded that they would push, or touch, the icons with the stylus, while one child didn’t know. All four children associated the icons with the stylus. The children were also able to tap on the icons and use the stylus with the alphabet keys. Although the PDA keyboard and screen size are concerns for educators, children in this study successfully coordinated this manipulative requirement. In addition, when students were asked to write letters in Note Pad, all four children held the stylus like a pen or pencil.
Maintaining the child’s focus and interest. According to psychologist Jean Piaget, irreversibility is one of the limitations of preoperational thought in which a child fails to understand that an operation or action can go both ways (Papalia, Olds and Feldman 1999). A 6 year old in the transitional phase to concrete operational stage would show characteristics in both preoperational and concrete operational thought. Thus, Piaget proposed that children between the ages of 5 and 8 should gradually move into the concrete operational stage (Trawick-Smith 2000).
The children understood the nature of reversibility - maneuvering from the home screen back to another program and back to the home screen. This notion of reversibility is an important skill necessary for the kind of operating system embedded in most PDAs. Those operating systems (in this case, Palm OS 5) can afford little overhead in terms of memory. Thus, they use a sequential navigation scheme instead of the multi-tasking approach of a desktop operating system, which makes PDA operating systems more age-appropriate in terms of maintaining focus on task.
All four children were highly interested and on task while manipulating the Palm. The children expressed excitement as they explored, and most articulated a desire to work for a longer time. Interestingly, both boys showed interest in playing games while the two girls did not.
Recognizing and remembering icons and graphics. Two children correctly assessed that the button with a house icon would take them to the original screen. One child accidentally pressed the exit button from one program, taking the child back to the home screen. Another child did not make a guess, but she did remember the function of the home button later on when shown by the research assistant. Once they saw the research assistant demonstrate this function, two children remembered to press the erase key with the stylus in Note Pad to get a new blank screen. The other two children did not have a chance to demonstrate whether they remembered this skill.
