EasySketch2: a novel sketch-based interface for improving children's fine motor skills and school readiness

Abstract

Children's fine motor skills are associated with enhanced drawing skills, as well as improved creativity, self-regulation skills, and school readiness. Assessing these skills enables parents and teachers to target areas of improvement for their children, so that they are better prepared for learning and achieving once they enter school. Conventional approaches rely on psychology-based tracing and drawing tasks using pencil-and-paper and performance metrics such as timing and accuracies. However, such approaches involve human experts to manually score children's drawings and evaluate their fine motor skills, which is both time consuming and prone to human error or bias. This paper introduces our novel sketch-based educational interface, which can classify children's fine motor skills more accurately than conventional methods by automatically classifying fine motor skills through sketch recognition techniques. The interface (1) employs a fine motor skill classifier, which decides children's fine motor skills based on their drawing skills and (2) includes a pedagogical system that assists children to draw basic shapes such as alphabet letters or numbers based on developmental level and learning progress, and provides teachers and parents with information on the maturity of the children's fine motor skills that correspond to their school readiness. We evaluated both our interface and star drawing test with 70 children (3-8 years), and found that our interface determined children's fine motor skills more accurately than the conventional approach. In addition to the fine motor skill assessment, our interface served as an educational tool that benefited children in teaching them how to draw, practice, and improve their drawing skills.