Keywords

1 Introduction

Reports have shown that unintentional injury, any injuries that are caused by an accident, is one of the most prevalent child health problems of our time [1]. Unintentional injuries are reported as the leading cause of death and disability for US children less then 19 years old at a 44% [1]. Among them, preschool children (3 to 6 years old), tend to have a higher percentage of injury rate as they have lower awareness and less safety knowledge. As the cognitive developmental level reaches mature at the average age of 18, children aged 0–18 years have less awareness of danger, ability to foresee and respond to danger. Reports also shown that the predominant location of injury is the home [2]. Injuries including burns, scalds and various trauma are mostly caused by falsely using appliances. Thus, injury prevention is a major focus among advocates of children’s health.

In the past, the most used methods for preventing children from home injuries are preschool teaching, parental supervision and access intervention. However, constant supervision and teaching is not possible. As a growing variety of media options has offered children broad learning opportunities, numerous electronic devices have been widely developed in the market with computer-based capabilities such as interactive story books, tag reading systems, electronic keyboards and music-makers, dolls and robots, electronic toys, dance pads and sports equipment. The advent of mobile application has stimulated a new aspect in the education domain. Several mobile applications have been developed for children in this age group such as ABC Memory Match, Peekaboo Barn, Mickey Mini Golf etc.

Active learning has been demonstrated as an important way to involve in learning [3]. Effective learning often takes place when children experience what is going on in their own heads [4]. Through physical engagement, involvement and activeness in learning can provoke children to reflect [5]. Digital augmentation allows children to interact with the physical world in a various of ways. While past studies have investigated the value of Augment Reality (AR) in children learning [6,7,8], few have paid attention to the potential of AR in home injury prevention.

Our study aims to explore the efficacy and possibilities of implementing smart devices into preschool safety education for its interacting features with real world settings. Therefore, we developed Kinder, an AR mobile application focusing on child safety education for this study. Because the most common environments where preschool children normally stay are schools and home, we focused on interviewing parents and preschool teachers. To understand how an AR application can be deployed in the context of safety education for preschool children, we focused on three research questions:

  • RQ1: How are digital devices used in families and in preschools?

  • RQ2: How are the safety educational measurement conducted in family and in preschool?

  • RQ3: How willing are parents and teacher to deploy the Kinder application?

2 Related Work

2.1 Digital Media-Based Learning

From the past decade, usage of traditional media for education and entertainment has shifted towards newer media such as physical objects or toys with computational features, physical activity equipment and smart devices [9,10,11]. Based on this trend, a spread of computer-based interactive products has been developed and a branch has been focusing on building applications that are tailored for young children. Studies in this field mainly focused on investigating the influence of such application on pre-school education. For instance, Yelland [12] found that digital media-based activities can engage children to learn and improve their abilities that were considered too advanced for such young children, including collaborative learning, reasoning, and problem solving [13]. In mobile device context, the accessibility of these devices provide more opportunity for children to use them repeatedly and ubiquitously [14] and such behavior may increase children’s engagement with the applications. Education applications can apply this advantage and allow children to be more engaged in the education materials. Along with these benefits, since most preschool children do not own mobile devices, they usually borrow from their parents, therefore, studies have also investigated the parent-child relationship in the context of mobile devices usage behavior and parents’ thoughts about this phenomenon [15, 16]. Even though using digital-based media for learning does provide promising results and show several benefits, there are still a few concerns about letting young children use these devices [17]. Several other benefits and drawbacks of digital media for young children can be found in the literatures [12, 18, 19].

2.2 Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality technology can offer great potential to engage learners [20] and to enhance the process of knowledge building [21]. We chose to apply AR technology because of the value of AR to bridge the learning gap between abstract descriptions and the real-world phenomena [22]. The potential of AR to enhance the presentations of real-world settings and the creation of engaging ways of interacting with simulations would motivate children to learn. There is also evidence that specific skills can be improved, and the technology offers many opportunities for collaboration [23, 24]. In present study we discussed an extensive evaluation of AR technology in the context of home and school safety education for preschool children.

Since children’s level of safety knowledge cannot predict the their possibility of getting injured, the best predictors were children’s compliance with home safety rules and the extent of parental supervision [25]. According to the over-learning effect, the learner’s understanding of a certain message increases as the number of times the message appears [26]. Over-learning effect enables learners to comprehend the knowledge from low-level skills and apply it to a higher level. Repeated behaviors can also give children a sense of familiarity. By touching the same toys, reading the same storybooks, and playing the same games over and over again, children can get a familiar sense of safe behavior, along with pleasure and accomplishment. In the process of repeated operations, children can learn the structure, predictability and causality of things. For example, how to catch a throwing ball. Learning from such a repeated pattern can also establish its reasoning ability. As a result, this study focuses on developing an application that children are able to learn from repeated patterns of home safety knowledge.

3 System Design

3.1 Analysis and Requirements Specification

Prior to designing the application, we visited a few families with preschool children to gain a rough understanding of the items that should first be recognized in Kinder as potentially dangerous objects. Concluded from short interviews with the parents, plugs, wires, stationaries, fans, and glasses were the most commonly contacted dangerous objects at home. Parents expressed their need to supervise their children’s behavior at all times and constantly warn their children not to touch these items. Therefore, the two objects we implemented as the “potentially dangerous objects” in the application are plugs and scissors for they have more features and are easier to be recognized. We used Unity for the application development and Vuforia with Unity to develop the AR features. We developed the application on Android studio in accordance with the industry standards and guidelines. To avoid introducing any additional user interface complexity, we used bigger fonts and buttons for readability and easier usage. The application was in Chinese and can be purchased for free through the mobile application store.

3.2 Application Design and Features

The benefits of learning through game playing (in a pedagogical perspective) has been widely acknowledged [27,28,29,30]. Many researches in the last decades have also shown that games which designed for mobile devices have potential to encourage learning [8, 31, 32]. Hence, we designed the Kinder as a game-based application that implemented quizzes for pedagogical purposes.

The application aimed to build exploring experiences. Once a child starts playing, there will be an anime character to interact with the child throughout the whole process. The anime character will move around the environment as the child scans around the room. When Kinder identifies a potentially dangerous object, the character would interact with the child either by having short informative conversations, playing videos showing how to correctly use the object or having the child take a few quizzes regarding the object. The child can earn points as he or she successfully selects the right answer. Getting the answers wrong over three times would end the game and provide options to start over.

Parents and teachers (or any kind of supervisors) play as “adults” in the Kinder application and act as an application manager for the children. Since different households can have very different furniture and objects in their homes, objects may not be recognizable due to unique shape or that they were undocumented in the database. In this case, adults can upload pictures of the objects that were not set in the system. After the objects are reviewed by the developers, the objects will be added to the database and will later be recognizable in the application. In addition to adding new objects to the “potentially dangerous object list”, adults can also set a timer for each round of game play and set password to access the adult settings. The focus of Kinder is to let preschool children have fun when identifying potentially dangerous objects/scenarios through repetitive learning in games and, at the same time, engaging parents or teachers to participate the experience.

4 Research Methodology

The goal of Kinder is to enable children to learn from a real environment combining AR and object recognition. This study sought to determine if such technology would be beneficial and suitable for children to use. According to TAM, factors such as usability and ease of use strongly affects the level of acceptance towards an information system. Other elements that could influence the acceptance and frequency of usage should also be considered, such as the habits and the environment of using smart devices. To investigate these factors, an in-dept interview and a questionnaire were taken to gain a deeper understanding of each factor. We focused more on the qualitative analyses to learn the insights related to children’s digital device using habits, safety education measurements of each family and preschool, and the overall feedback of the Kinder application. Through a mixed-method approach, the results can support and yield more decisive findings [33,34,35]. Our user target is people who interacts with preschool children on a daily basis and deals with safety rules and education, mainly parents and preschool teachers. There was little ethnic diversity in the sample of both methods as all of them were Asian. The participants and procedure of each method are presented below.

4.1 In-Depth Interview

The sample included 6 participants, 4 parents and 2 preschool teachers, recruited through local universities and kindergartens. The children in the parents’ group includes 3 girls (2 four-year-old and one three-year-old) and 2 boys (four-year-old and six-year old). Children in the kindergarten group were between 3–6 years old. Before the interview, participants were first given the introduction video of Kinder to help them grasp a rough idea of the application. The interview was divided into three sections. Firstly, we asked questions about how digital devices were used in homes and preschools, such as how often the children use them and how familiar they were with the devices. The second part was how they conduct safety education in homes and schools, what were their approaches and what they found effective. Lastly was the Kinder application user experience feedback, where we discussed more on the application details and asked the participants to give feedback. There were a few common questions that every participant was asked to answer, but questions regarding details were directed towards each case. For example, we asked preschool teachers questions about teaching experience in classrooms and asked parents about parent-child interactions at homes.

4.2 Questionnaires

In total, we collected 23 responses from parents and preschool teachers, one of them was male and 22 of them were female, 4 of them were between 21–30 years old, 11 of them were between 31–40 years old and 8 of them were between 41–50 years old. In terms of character, 12 of the participants were mothers, 10 of them were preschool teachers and 1 of them was father. All respondents completed the questionnaire with 21 questions. The participants were first asked about the age of his/her children and gender. According to the suggestions from the professors of the department of education, we divided the preschool children into two groups, 3–4 and 5–6, based on their cognitive level. In the group of 3–4 years old, there were 11 boys and 10 girls. In the 5–6 years old group, there were 12 boys and 15 girls. If the participants have more than one child in the same age group (for example if a parent have a 3-year-old boy and a 4-year-old girl), they were asked to give an average answer (3.5 in this case). After the basic demographic information, an introduction video of Kinder was shown to them with the features of the application and using scenarios. The video was followed by series of questions regarding the usability of Kinder. Because the main purpose of this study was to explore possible benefits of Kinder, the questionnaire focused more on getting feedback from the participants.

5 Results

In this section, we first report results from the interview with parents and preschool teachers, then followed by the results from the questionnaire.

5.1 Digital Devices Using Habits

In terms of child use habits of digital devices, parents have more experience on this topic. The parents reported that their children were familiar with basic functions of smart devices, such as unlocking, swiping and camera. Even though the children were allowed to use smart devices on their own, they only use specific applications, mostly watch videos on YouTube. In addition, the parents would limit the length of time of using smart devices to prevent their children from staring at the devices for too long and cause vision damage. Preschool teachers have less experience of children using smart devices since in most kindergarten classes, smart devices are not used. The only cases where the devices are used are when the teachers use videos as tools to support learning. For example, showing pictures or videos of trees are effective to help children build knowledge of tree species. Another example that the preschool teachers provided was dance classes using videos.

5.2 Child Safety

In the context of home security education, most parents educate their children by repeated oral reminder and some of them use education videos, preschool teachers also agree that videos are good materials for security education. In addition to videos, most parents used tools or hardware such as safety plugs and drawer blocks to block children from accessing dangerous areas. However, both parents and teachers believed that security education must be personality-dependent. One point worth notice was that two out of the three parents reported that their children watched the same cartoon character repeatedly, the children gained deep impression of the behaviors of the character, and the parents would purchase the same series of education material.

5.3 Kinder Feedback

The last part of the interview is the user experience of Kinder. Overall, participants were positive about Kinder. They were willing and excited to use Kinder for child safety education. They reported that the game-based aspect of Kinder is an interesting idea and that it is very likely to attract children. Several other benefits of Kinder were also reported, including potential to improve literacy, problem solving skills and concentration. However, there were a few concerns that the participants reported. For instance, for children to start using smart devices at such young age, they must be accompanied by their parents, and the children may damage their vision if play time is not properly controlled. The participants also provided some suggestions, including adding more games or stories to enrich the application and prevent the children from getting bored easily, another one is to add an alert function that will send notification to parents if their child accidently interact with dangerous objects.

6 Discussion

Given the potential benefits of learning through digital media devices, we developed Kinder to support preschool children in identifying potentially dangerous objects in different real-world environments. As a pilot study, we focused firstly on parents and kindergarten teachers, who are the most experienced individuals in interacting with preschool children. Three aspects were closely studied to evaluate the possibilities of implementing Kinder: digital devices use habits of preschool children, safety education in families and schools, parents and preschool teachers’ willingness to apply Kinder. Although at this stage our work cannot be conclusive, the preliminary results show promising prospects of digital media-based learning in safety education.

Amongst the responses to the various questions in the interview and questionnaire, there were several indications that supported the potential of the AR approach for promoting learning and motivating children to engage with learning activities. Most parents and teachers indicated that the application would be beneficial for children by supporting them to memorize the location of dangerous objects and the correct ways of using the objects. Both parents and teachers believed that children would have confidence in using Kinder. The results from the interview and questionnaire indicated that AR application can support in safety education to some degree. Some active parents and teachers were willing to cooperate to improve the development of Kinder.

Even though game-based learning through digital media devices have been proved to be beneficial [28, 31, 32, 36,37,38], there are still factors to consider in designing the application in the future. In Freitas’s review of game-based learning, one of the key findings was that motivation was a vital factor of effective learning [39, 40]. Motivation needs to be sustained through feedback responses, reflection and active involvement. Although there is potential to implement AR and object recognition in home safety education, developers still have to create applications that ffer necessary learner control, challenging interactivity and motivating experience. Therefore, the main challenge for effective learning with games is for the learner to be engaged, motivated, supported and interested. In addition, the content and support materials need to be differentiated for school and home use in order to respect the differing needs of teachers and parents, and meanwhile maintaining the opportunity for coherent multi-location learning experiences.

We intent to further present study by adding more features based on the results, including designing functions that would induce motivation and construct more objects that children can interact with. Furthermore, we plan to conduct more user study to gain a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of Kinder.

7 Limitations

In this study, we used markerless AR to develop Kinder because the technology requires no prior knowledge of the user’s environment to overlay 3D content into a scene and hold it to a fixed point in space. However, markerless AR is dependent on the number of angles of objects. There are three major object recognition limitations in the development process. First, for circular objects, the lack of angle may lower the reading ability due to its low score in Vuforia target manager. Second, complex patterns of objects could hamper the effectiveness of identifying the objects. Third, brightness in the environment would influence the rendering of objects. Even though Kinder can be used in various environment, currently it can only work in outdoor environment.