A study of children emotion and their performance while handwriting Arabic characters using a haptic device

Abstract

Emotion and focus of children during handwriting are essential for language learning. Handwriting for young children is challenging because it needs deep motivation and willingness to complete the task regardless of its difficulty. Recently, emerged haptic guidance systems have a good potential to offer children a better sense of engagement to keep their interests awake. Yet, handwriting in 3D is more challenging for children due to many reasons including demotivation, out of focus, and visuomotor coordination difficulties. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of a haptic device in analyzing schoolchildren emotion, attentiveness and handwriting performance of Arabic letters. We conducted the experiments for a period of four weeks with an immersive environment where the subjects practiced writing in VR environment using a haptic device-controlled stylus. We assessed the childrens' emotions to get insights into their engagement during such hard learning environment. We found that our approach improved the participants' fine-motor skills and handwriting quality. However, our analysis revealed that such task was effective on detecting emotions (angry/neutral) only as a negative/positive contributor of performance. Overall, the obtained findings can well contribute to the understanding of the relationship between students' emotions and other variables in an attempt to support the development of adaptive learning technologies.