Mobile educational apps for children: towards development of i-CARES framework.

Mobile devices have becoming a new phenomenon not only among adults but also children of all ages. Children use these devices most frequently for entertainment purposes especially to playing games easily downloaded via online mobile app distribution stores such as Google Play and Apple’s App Store, more than for its educational purposes. Consequently parents and educators in general are concerned with the impact of this phenomenon – or mobile apps addiction – among their children. This is due to the inappropriateness of the apps content and graphics for their growing children. What is much needed is educational-appropriate mobile educational apps suitable for children. This paper discusses i-CARES, a five-phase framework detailing proposed sequential processes of selecting, categorizing, reviewing, evaluating and synthesizing variety of mobile educational apps for children. The framework was based on two theoretical models that is Howard Gardner’s (1993) and Jean Piaget’s (1928) theories of Multiple Intelligences and Stages of Development from birth to the age of 12 . Each stage of the framework consists of specific processes and tangible outputs to inform the selection of the apps. The i-CARES framework is intended to act as practical guidelines for parents and educators alike to make informed decision in utilization of any mobile educational apps. Introduction Mobile computing devices such as iPad, tablet computers, netbooks and smartphones have become a social phenomenon in today’s society. It is not uncommon to see children of all ages as early as preschoolers to teenagers walking around with these gadgets in their hands. They use the gadgets not only to communicate with their friends and acquaintances, but also to organize their daily activities from planning on what movie to watch during the weekends to buying things online (Yusop & Sumari, 2013). Because these mobile devices havebecome part of children’s everyday activity and lifestyle, it is quite impossible for parents to preventthem from using the technologies. Instead parents should take control over the type of mobile apps including games that their children are playing with. Mobile apps in this paper refers to various software applications designed for and downloadable to mobile devices such as smartphones, computer tablets, and iPads, among others. Whilst there are thousands of apps available in the market today, choosing the most appropriate ones for children to use and play with is problematic. This is because some of the apps such as games-based apps are very entertainment-oriented and lack of its educational impact on child cognitive and attitude development. Moreover some apps are unsuitable for specific age of the children which may result in issue with content appropriateness or to some extent graphic appropriateness. Violent games for instance do not have much, if not any, educational values for children to learn from and are definitely unsuitable for younger children. This paper proposes a design and development approach to help parents and educators in choosing suitable mobile educational apps for children from birth to 12 year old. This approach focuses on the five crucial steps parents and educators should apply based on two main theoretical constructs: Howard Gardner’s (1993) Multiple Intelligences theory and Jean Piaget’s (1928) Stages of Development theory. Both theories are discussed in the following section.