Haptic explorers: Supporting science journaling through mobile haptic feedback displays

Abstract

• The design and evaluation of a haptic science learning application is presented. • Adding haptic feedback to mobile devices can support science learning in the wild. • Haptic feedback increased tactile language during nature observations. • Children were more on task when science journaling incorporated haptic feedback. Mobile devices are promising for enabling young children to document and reflect on science-related phenomena in their world. Yet, tactile information, which is central to early science learning, is lost when interacting with traditional mobile devices. We present Haptic Explorers, an application for the TPaD Phone that allows learners to capture and annotate images with audio and haptic feedback. We describe the design of this application and an evaluation with 35 children (aged 5–7) during a science summer camp. We found that children using haptic devices included more tactile descriptors when reflecting on the contents of their notebook and were on-task more often than their peers in the non-haptic group. Our results also suggest that haptic feedback is relevant for learning activities that involve concrete observation and when tactile sensory information aids in making descriptive comparisons. We discuss the potential for mobile haptic feedback displays to support early science inquiry and multimodal science talk.