EasySketch: A Sketch-based Educational Interface to Support Children’s Self-regulation and School Readiness

Abstract

Fine motor skills and executive attentions play a critical role in determining children's self-regulation. Self-regulation contributes to children's school readiness. Fine motor skills and executive attentions can be taught through sketching and writing activities. The growing ubiquity of touch-enabled computing devices can enhance children's sketching ability via sketch-based playful educational applications. From the applications, children can draw sketches and potentially develop their fine motor skills. Unfortunately, those applications do not analyze the maturity of children's fine motor skills in order to help parents and teachers understand the strengths and weaknesses of a child's drawing ability. If an intelligent user interface can determine children's fine motor skills automatically, teachers and parents can assess children's fine motor skill ability and help children to improve via practicing drawings with touch-enabled devices or pencil and paper. The improvements can also extend to the children's self-regulation ability and thus their school readiness. In this paper, we present our sketch-based educational application EasySketch. The application teaches children how to draw digits and characters, classifies the sketcher's level of fine motor skill automatically, and returns feedback corresponding to that result.