Coming Together: R&D and Children's Entertainment Company in Designing APPs for Learning Early Math.

Carlos Mera,Gonzalo Ruiz,Esperanza Marchena,Inmaculada Menacho,Manuel Aguilar,Manuel García Sedeño,Estíbaliz Aragón,Cándida Delgado,Jose I Navarro

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02751

Abstract

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have an increasing influence on the way we interact, learn, and live. The increase in teaching and learning methodologies that are mediated by ICT in the field of education and in the domestic settings encourages the design of new effective technological tools, supported by scientific research and development to improve student learning. The challenge psychology is facing in the education field is to promote those technologies and make them available to the education community. Technologies also would produce attractive items for users and realistic commercial issues for businesses. This also allows an effective transfer for scientific work, providing visibility to Research and Development. In this context, the main aim of the article is to describe the process to get an agreement between Babyradio (a children’s entertainment company: https://babyradio.es/) and our research team, starting a collaborative work between two groups of people (Babyradio’s technical designer and Psychologist-Engineers software designer), in order to create several educative applications (APPs) in the field of early mathematics cognition. The institutional framework of the relationship of the R&D project and a children’s entertainment company is described. The article also focuses on experience in Psychology, Technological Innovation, and Entrepreneurship. In considering the efficiency of the agreement, we present different APPs designed for tablets and smartphone devices, adapted to the different operating systems (IOS, Android, Windows). APPs are designed to instill the cognitive fundamentals associated with early math learning for students aged 4 to 7 years. The study developed after this babyradio-university enterprise agreement contributes to the development of mathematics skills in children, aged 4–7 years, so that they can successfully meet the mathematics school requirements; it also contributes to encouraging a more positive attitude toward mathematics. This study also suggests how the education system and software and educational content developers’ companies would manage verified instructional APPs, with a more realistic commercial perspective.

Highlights

Mathematical learning is an essential tool for school success and has an important impact on personal adaptation to everyday life
Significant efforts have been made in the last decade to change this tendency, results have been very dissimilar. Methods such as “open calculation based on numbers” (ABN), have allowed some countries to substantially modify the teaching-learning process of mathematics starting with the pre-primary school levels (Aragón et al, 2017)
The main goals of this work are threefold: (1) to present the institutional framework of the relationship between the R&D project and Babyradio, a children’s entertainment company; (2) to share the collaboration scheme that may have applied attention for other R&D projects; and (3) to show some of the educational prototypes generated by this research-business collaboration and its applied experimental development

Summary

Introduction

Mathematical learning is an essential tool for school success and has an important impact on personal adaptation to everyday life. Teaching mathematics in schools has received different criticisms from experts. They believe the method should be substantially modified in order to reduce the current failure in this matter (Martínez Montero, 2017). Significant efforts have been made in the last decade to change this tendency, results have been very dissimilar. Methods such as “open calculation based on numbers” (ABN), have allowed some countries to substantially modify the teaching-learning process of mathematics starting with the pre-primary school levels (Aragón et al, 2017). It is necessary to carry out studies that confirm advantages of this new type of methodology (Cerda et al, 2018)

Objectives

Methods

Results