Children book app as emotional learning media

Abstract

Emotion is an important key to adapt in society and therefore it needs to be learned since early age, as it is not something that a person was born with. A lot of media have been introduced as a helping tool for emotion learning including digital literature such as book app. Most of the existing examples, however, are lack of engaging interactive feature which resulting in low emotional affordance. The non-engaging interactive features are not only creating distraction during storytelling, yet they are also lowering children's personal response of emotion-learning content. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effective method to improve emotional affordance in emotional themed book-app, thus increasing the value of its emotional learning content. This study is aiming for children age 6-8 years old (first to third grade of elementary school) as its primary target, as children at these years meet new social challenge in form of school and peers. This study uses a qualitative research approach with application of designed-based research (DBR) method, divided into analysis of problems by literature study; review on existed book-app with negative emotion theme and data collecting from questionnaire; development of solutions through prototype building; iterative cycles of prototype testing; and evaluation of design solution's validation. The conclusion delivers a design suggestion in how to improve emotional affordance inside negative emotional themed book-app through interactive visualization of familiar gesture. © 2017 ACM.