A Study of Children Engagement and Focus During Handwriting in VR with a Haptic Device

Abstract

Engagement and focus of children during the handwriting process are essential factors for language learning and concepts acquisition. Handwriting for young children is challenging because it needs large motivation, great efforts and willingness to complete the task properly regardless of its difficulty. However, it is a most to learn writing by hand to capture the language structure and be able to communicate. Recently, emerged haptic guidance systems have shown to be a good approach to offer children a better sense of engagement during the writing task. In addition, handwriting in a virtual reality VR environment with the haptic device may improve the grasp of vocabulary as the learners need to spend a lot of time to form a word with deep concentration and physical efforts. In fact, the learners need to maintain the device pen by hand, follow up the letters' trajectories in a 3D space, and keep their arm up during the whole writing process. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of a haptic device within a VR environment in improving the schoolchildren engagement, focus and handwriting quality of Arabic letters. We selected 15 children from the Dutch International school in Doha with ages varying from 5 to 9 years old. We run extensive experiments for a period of two weeks with the assistance of teachers and staff. The obtained results show that the proposed approach effectively increases the children motivation and improves their handwriting quality.