Smart Use of Smart Phones in Classrooms – Interrupt Fun to Educate

Abstract

Nowadays, technology is invading our homes and schools. Teenagers, children, and even babies are attached to smart devices and their apps. Parents and teachers are trying to resist this trend as they believe their children are spending a lot of time playing and having fun with these devices. They think the more the children play, the less time they have for studying. The researchers decided to go against this trend and came up with a new concept called IF2E (Interrupt Fun to Educate). They developed a special app called KidKit to be installed on smart devices. It allows the teacher or the parent to create a test of several questions of different format on a specific subject. The child will be given the smart device with KidKit installed and running. S/He will not be able to close or stop the KidKit app because it is password protected. The app will ask the child a question; when the correct answer is provided, the child will be rewarded and KidKit will open his/her favorite game for a minute. After this, another question will pop up, and the cycle is repeated every minute until the test is over. The researchers introduced KidKit to four sections of grade six studying programming. The students were evaluated with and without KidKit using four different exams. A one-way ANOVA was used to compare the results. The results showed that KidKit had a positive effect on student achievement.