Developing an educational application for first grade students based on handwriting recognition

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1640595 (Table of Contents)

Tablet computers have become a significant consumer technology by providing a more natural way of interaction via touch sensitive screens, compared to keyboard and mouse input. For this purpose, they are being used increasingly for education purposes, especially aimed for children. In this thesis, an educational application based on handwriting recognition technologies is developed for 1st grade students. The developed application lets teachers prepare online study material directly from text books that students write on and receive back a rich set of information such as timing and writing order, along with a student's completed homework. Arithmetic and linguistic exercises suitable for first grade curriculum are implemented into application. The thesis covers all aspects about designing and developing such an educational application, including: how to design a friendly and straightforward interface for children; how to prepare study material paralleling a variety of question types (matching, arithmetic, Turkish) found in elementary school education; and what applications would be most beneficial on the tablet platform. Besides the design and user interface issues, technical solutions are developed for how to implement sophisticated applications such as a Hidden Markov Model based recognizer on the Android platform, and how to verify answers. After the initial design, assessments are collected from first grade students on two separate occasions and the design of the application was iteratively improved to suit the young students’ needs who have still-developing motor skills and lesser experience with technology compared to most adults.