Abstract
The outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has caused unprecedented global socio-economic disruptions. One of the areas negatively impacted is the education system. The country’s over reliance on traditional face-to-face teaching has brought about serious challenges to policymakers who have to decide how learning would proceed in the absence of physical contact between the teacher and the learner. This has been exacerbated by the general lack of access to textbooks and other teaching and learning materials which makes it difficult for parents to assist with home schooling. The potential use of mobile apps to support and enhance early childhood learning has received little attention in developing countries such as Zimbabwe, yet its impact in supporting early childhood education would be enormous during and post the COVID-19 pandemic. The study seeks to develop a numeracy-based app prototype that uses a local language (IsiNdebele) in a classroom or home-based schooling in response to the COVID-19 pandemic or other natural disasters or man-made situations that may make face-to-face interaction impossible. The analysis showed that kindergarten teachers had positive opinion towards the app as they perceived the prototype to be useful, easy to use, simple and that learners would be eager to use it. The results of this study can inform policymakers and educators on optimising technology based early teaching and learning at school and home.
Highlights
The COVID-19 has become a global threat to humanity and taken the world by storm, reconstructing the terrain of every aspect of life (Akwa, Ning,& Maing, 2020; Papapicco, 2020; Sintema, 2020), after its first outbreak in Wuhan city of Hubei province in the people’s republic of China (Tanhan et al, 2020)
The results show that numeracy apps have the potential of improving early childhood learning
These preliminary evaluation results show that there is need to develop apps that can facilitate numeracy learning for kindergarten children during natural disasters like the COVID-19 and other man-made situations that render face-to-face teaching and learning impossible
Summary
The COVID-19 has become a global threat to humanity and taken the world by storm, reconstructing the terrain of every aspect of life (Akwa, Ning,& Maing, 2020; Papapicco, 2020; Sintema, 2020), after its first outbreak in Wuhan city of Hubei province in the people’s republic of China (Tanhan et al, 2020). The global academic calendar was disrupted as schools and higher education institutions shutdown and adopted precautionary measures to contain the spread of the virus through social distancing (Demuyakor, 2020). Zimbabwean education system was not an exception, igniting the need to explore new ways of teaching such as online to compensate the lost time due to COVID 19. Schools were prematurely closed on the 24th of March 2020 to limit physical contact and contain the spread of the acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-COV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19. Among other measures that have been adopted by governments across the world to contain the spread of COVID-19 include social distancing, closure of non-essential services and frequent
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