To use PYA tool or not for learning Japanese hand alphabets

ABSTRACT

We are developing an easy-to-use edutainment system: Practice! YUBIMOJI AIUEO (PYA). The objective is to promote basic expressions of Kana characters (AIUEO) of Japanese hand alphabets (YUBIMOJI) to ordinary children at elementary school age. PYA seems to work well from users' behaviors and responses, however, the effectiveness has not been fully confirmed, so far. In this paper, we have carried out series of intensive experiments at classrooms of Sumiyoshi Elementary School (7 or 8 years old; 83 subjects). The results are summarized as follows: 1) Devices the children use to learn do not affect the performance just after the study; 2) the PC use is effective when the target characters are complex and similar; and 3) The PC users keep remembering difficult shapes of characters after one month. These results have suggested that the use of PCs is superior to the ordinary oral lectures, however, it depends on the features of characters.

References

1. Bruckman, A., and Bandlow, A. Human-Computer Interaction for Kids. In {3}, (2002) 428--440.
2. Elliott, R., Glauert, J. R. W., Kennaway, J. R., and Marshall, I. The Development of Language Processing Support for the ViSiCAST Project. Fourth Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (2000) 101--108.
3. Harada, Y.: PYA Web-Page. (2004) http://ss4.idd.tamabi.ac.jp/~haraday/yubimoji/
4. Jacko J. A., and Sears, A. (eds) The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications. Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc Inc. (2002).
5. Magnussen, M.: Videotelephony in Intervention with People with Speech and Language Disabilities. 12th Annual Conference, Technology and Persons with Disabilities, MAGNU2_T.TXT (1997).
6. Michaud, L. N., McCoy, K. F., and Christopher, A. An Intelligent Tutoring System for Deaf Learners of Written English. Fourth Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (2000) 92--100.
7. Miki Namatame, Yasuhi Harada, Fusako Kusunoki, Takao Terano, Letting Every Pupil Learn Japanese Hand Alphabets with Visual Interfaces. Proc. CHI 2004, (2004) 1363--1366.
8. Miki Namatame, Yasuhi Harada, Fusako Kusunoki, Takao Terano, Shigenori Inagaki, What you Look Like When Learning Hand Alphabets. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE 2005), (2005) 377--378.
9. Sherman, L., et al. StoryKit: Tools for Children to Build Room-sized Interactive Experiences. Proc. CHI 2001, (2001) 197--198.
10. Su, S. A., and Furuta, R. K. VRML-Based Representations of ASL Fingerspelling on the World-Wide Web. Third Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (1998) 43--45.
11. Hiroshi Nakagawa, Tatsunori Mori. "A Simple but Powerful Automatic Term Extraction Method", Computerm2: 2nd International Workshop on Computational Terminology, COLING-2002 WORKSHOP, (2002) 29--35.
12. Hiroshi Nakagawa, Tatsunori Mori: "Automaic Term Recognition based on Statistics of Compound Nouns and their Components", Terminology, Vol.9 No.2, (2003) 201--209.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)