Cultivating Recycling Awareness in Preschoolers using Animated Interactive Comic

Abstract

Recycling awareness is a crucial social responsibility that needs to be cultivated in the community especially to the young generation. Knowledge of recycling awareness is less exposed to children especially in school since it is an activity that is not applied by parents at home because they are busy with work. Therefore, this study introduces an interactive animated comic of recycling, as an alternative learning application to facilitate children in preschool in learning and gaining new knowledge. i-Recycle consists of numerous storylines such as weekly activities collecting recycled items at home with family, cleaning the park with friends, and learning activities in the classroom. This study integrates all components using a three-phase development model, which consists of pre-development, development, and post-development phases. Usability testing has been conducted with 20 children in an individual setting to ensure that i-Recycle is usable and learnable, as those are the important elements to cultivate awareness among the children. The result revealed that 79.75% of the participants agreed i-Recycle is applicable, easy to use, and easy to learn. In fact, the user acceptance results also proven that the application is useful, easy to use, and acceptable (μ = 3.9). The result disclosed that i-Recycle is interesting for target users to gain new knowledge and learn about recycling through storytelling and animated comic. However, it requires improvement in terms of audio and interface design to ensure the application could suffice the needs of preschoolers.