Implementing and Testing an Interactive Educational Story Mobile App

Abstract

In this research, we developed an iOS interactive children story app named “The Little Red Riding Hood” using design-thinking principles. The aim was to improve the child's literacy, reading and retelling skills. To investigate the effect, we conducted an empirical experiment comparing our method with the traditional printed stories. A group of 12 students aged between 8–9 years old in the 3rd grade participated in our experiment. The students were divided into two groups: one used our interactive story app and the other used a traditional printed story. They were assigned to spend around (15–20) minutes in listening to the story from an iPad or the teacher and doing related activities. A rubric tables were used to assess the participant's abilities and skills, which are filled by the teacher in both conditions. The preliminary results revealed that the students who used our interactive story app showed significant differences in improving retelling skills compared with those who used printed story. However, the results showed slightly improvement in literacy and reading skills. Given its importance, more research is needed to better understand the long effects of interactive story app in developing reading and literacy skills.