Researchers assess the value of apps for early childhood learning
Kindergarten pupils armed with iPads are helping researchers in the US to evaluate and develop the mathematics apps of the future
Elias was shy at first. "He's four," his teacher whispered when he would not say his age. He made no sound as his peers rushed to the tables with the iPads. When a friend grabbed the device to take his photo, he covered his eyes with his hands.
Maybe it was the room full of strangers that had him a little spooked. Six software developers and designers from WGBH, a Boston public television station, had descended on his classroom at the Little Sprouts childcare centre in the US state of Massachusetts, bearing a fleet of iPads.
Their mission was to test prototypes of maths apps they had been working on for months - tools designed with the help of researchers in child development and cognitive science - and to learn from pupils like Elias. Would he understand how to play the games? Would he like them? Would he learn anything?
One of the adults showed him Breakfast Time, an app meant to lay the groundwork for understanding fractions. A waffle appeared on screen. "Can you slice it?" the man asked Elias.
Educational apps have been booming in the six years since the arrival of the iPhone's touch screen, despite warnings from some educators that children could spend too much time with devices and too little time exploring the physical world. The iTunes store offers more than 95,000 educational apps.
Nearly three-quarters are aimed at kindergarten and primary pupils, said a 2012 report by Joan Ganz Cooney Centre, a research organisation affiliated to Sesame Workshop, the non-profit producer of Sesame Street.
Concern about the foundations of maths education has helped fuel this hunger for apps. A 2009 report from the US National Academy of Sciences recommended increasing informal opportunities for children to learn maths, including through "software and other media".