As a May 2014 survey conducted by Common Sense Media points out, parents have begun to read less to their children, especially as a result of the arrival of the smartphone or tablet . Also, according to findings published in 2019 in JAMA Pediatrics by researchers from the University of Michigan, parents who read to their children on a tablet , whether it was an interactive digital book or not, experienced less social reciprocity.
Many other parents prefer to give this device to the child so that it is he himself who chooses what content to consume. However, reading to a child is important for their linguistic development , as this is how they better learn the language, its structure, its grammatical features, in addition to the fact that these readings lay the foundations to learn words that children would never hear in another context.
Other parents download interactive books that are automatically read to children, so they no longer think it is necessary for them to do so. So that this good habit is not lost, then, a research tool called ThinkRBook has been developed.
A development of the MIT Media Lab
Cynthia Breazeal and her PhD candidate Angela Chang , from the Personal Robots Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, are the developers of the research tool TinkRBook ( textual tinkerability , that is, the ability to fiddle with text).
In this way, a child can experiment with text in a way that is quite similar to how an interaction with his parents would take place if they were reading the same text to him. So, for example, if the child touches a word on the screen, he can hear it with a recorded voice .
In this way, the child interacts with the text at different levels, altering even the narrative itself: if the word is “chicken”, then it can see the image of a hen, or influence its actions (such as having an egg) or in its characteristics (change in color of the hen’s feathers). With ThinkRbook you can also develop vocabulary or elaborate concepts.
As Breazeal explains: “Within the context of shared reading, we have identified new interaction designs created jointly by a panel of experts from various narrative and educational disciplines. We have proposed a series of interaction techniques to select and navigate through of numerous causal relationships between text and images. We also suggest a building block metaphor for creating interactive story elements. When we begin to observe users with the interface, it will become clear that certain interactions are more suitable for active narrative exploration. ” .
The purpose of all these options is for the child to develop a more active cognitive understanding of what reading means, and not to be just another entertainment option, such as watching a video. It even goes beyond the fact that reading is not a completely passive activity. In addition, the tool also allows parents to be more involved : the explicit demonstration of semantic highlighting and modifiable story elements allowed them to talk about the story elements.
Preliminary results from this ongoing fieldwork suggest that children love to explore a scene extensively and enjoy multisensory interaction techniques. A surprising observation is how much they enjoy the multi-sensory ability to control animations, exhibiting random tap and point behaviors to try and make things happen. This behavior seems analogous to existing requests to re-read your favorite books .
Beyond being a foundation for developing future add-ons for parents who have lost the habit of reading to their children, ThinkRBook also aspires to be a valuable tool for children raised in difficult environments who lack books, a teacher, or a school. Be that as it may, research on how to return to the tablet and smartphone qualities that traditional books have (and the interaction with parents or guardians) continues, especially when children access these devices at an earlier age.
