A Fine Motor Skill Classifying Framework to Support Children's Self-Regulation Skills and School Readiness

Children’s self-regulation skills predict their school-readiness and social behaviors, and assessing these skills enables parents and teachers to target areas for improvement or prepare children to enter school ready to learn and achieve. Assessing these skills enables parents and teachers to target areas for improvement or prepare children to enter school ready to learn and achieve. To assess children’s fine motor skills, current educators are assessing those skills by either determining their shape drawing correctness or measuring their drawing time durations through paper-based assessments. However, the methods involve human experts manually assessing children’s fine motor skills, which are time consuming and prone to human error and bias. As there are many children that use sketch-based applications on mobile and tablet devices, computer-based fine motor skill assessment has high potential to solve the limitations of the paper-based assessments. Furthermore, sketch recognition technology is able to offer more detailed, accurate, and immediate drawing skill information than the paper-based assessments such as drawing time or curvature difference. While a number of educational sketch applications exist for teaching children how to sketch, they are lacking the ability to assess children’s fine motor skills and have not proved the validity of the traditional methods onto tablet-environments. We introduce our fine motor skill classifying framework based on children’s digital drawings on tablet-computers. The framework contains two fine motor skill classifiers and a sketch-based educational interface (EasySketch). The fine motor skill classifiers contain: (1) KimCHI: the classifier that determines children’s fine motor skills based on their overall drawing skills and (2) KimCHI2: the classifier that determines children’s fine motor skills based on their curvature- and corner-drawing skills. Our fine motor skill classifiers determine children’s fine motor skills by generating 131 sketch features, which can analyze their drawing ability (e.g. DCR sketch feature can determine their curvature-drawing skills). We first implemented the KimCHI classifier, which can determine children’s fine motor skills based on their overall drawing skills. From our evaluation with 10- fold cross-validation, we found that the classifier can determine children’s fine motor skills with an f-measure of 0.904. After that, we implemented the KimCHI2 classifier, which can determine children’s fine motor skills based on their curvature- and corner-drawing skills. From our evaluation with 10-fold cross-validation, we found that the classifier can determine children’s curvature-drawing skills with an f-measure of 0.82 and corner-drawing skills with an f-measure of 0.78. The KimCHI2 classifier outperformed the KimCHI classifier during the fine motor skill evaluation. EasySketch is a sketch-based educational interface that (1) determines children’s fine motor skills based on their drawing skills and (2) assists children how to draw basic shapes such as alphabet letters or numbers based on their learning progress. When we evaluated our interface with children, our interface determined children’s fine motor skills more accurately than the conventional methodology by f-measures of 0.907 and 0.744, accordingly. Furthermore, children improved their drawing skills from our pedagogical feedback. Finally, we introduce our findings that sketch features (DCR and Polyline Test) can explain children’s fine motor skill developmental stages. From the sketch feature distributions per each age group, we found that from age 5 years, they show notable fine motor skill development

Recognizing Elementary Elements in Chemical Diagram Sketches

Organic Chemistry is a challenging subject that requires dedicated practice to learn the meticulous rules composing the subject, otherwise a student risks failure. Current software to teach chemical structures contains drag-and-drop components and fails to provide students with true understanding of Organic Chemistry concepts. My solution is to integrate a sketch recognition interface that can learn to recognize components of various, user-sketched chemical structures with a back-propagation neural network that can be trained to translate the components of the chemical structure to determine correctness. The accuracy of the program will be rigorously tested to determine correctness in interpreting chemical structures

Recognizing Elementary Elements in Chemical Diagram Sketches

Organic Chemistry is a challenging subject that requires dedicated practice to learn the meticulous rules composing the subject, otherwise a student risks failure. Current software to teach chemical structures contains drag-and-drop components and fails to provide students with true understanding of Organic Chemistry concepts. My solution is to integrate a sketch recognition interface that can learn to recognize components of various, user-sketched chemical structures with a back-propagation neural network that can be trained to translate the components of the chemical structure to determine correctness. The accuracy of the program will be rigorously tested to determine correctness in interpreting chemical structures

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 4: Learning, Technology, Thinking

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 4 includes papers from Learning, Technology and Thinking tracks of the conference

Experiences with GRAIL::Learning Design support in .LRN

The IMS-LD specification allow the transcription of almost any pedagogical model in a "Unit of Learning" (UoL), which is a package where contents and methodology are combined together in order to be deployed in a compliant software. Making use of GRAIL as the supporting tool inside the .LRN Learning Management System, this paper presents two real experiences of use where IMS-LD has been used to deploy pedagogical models with different levels of complexity

Towards a practitioner-centered approach to the design of e-learning competence editors

Girardin, F., Ayman, M., & Josep, B. (2007). Towards a practitioner-centered approach to the design of e-learning competence editors. In T. Navarrete, J. Blat & R. Koper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd TENComptence Open workshop 'Current Research on IMS Learning Design and Lifelong Competence Development Infrastucture' (pp. 99-104). June, 20-21, 2007, Barcelona, Spain: TENCompetence.This article reports on the background research on requirements and current approaches to editors for learning curriculum designers. First we take a critique look at the state of the art in the domain of learning activity editors. We then look back in the information visualization and interaction literature to discuss the design challenged of such tools. From these current theories and applied works we define a set a rules that are crucial for the design of CDP editors based developed on top of complex e-learning models. Finally, we exemplify the set of design rules with a prototype integrating tightly coupled map-based and Gantt chart views.The work on this publication has been sponsored by the TENCompetence Integrated Project that is funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, priority IST/Technology Enhanced Learning. Contract 027087 [http://www.tencompetence.org

Current Research on IMS Learning Design and Lifelong Competence Development Infrastructures

These proceedings consist of the papers presented at the Third TENCompetence Open Workshop which were accepted after peer reviewing. The workshop theme was Current Research on IMS Learning Design and Lifelong Competence Development Infrastructures. The workshop took place at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, on the 21st and 22nd of June 2007