Preschool safety education with digital media-based learning application – kinder

While unintentional injuries are the leading cause of morbidity and mortality among children, reports have shown that unintentional injuries mostly take place at home or school environments with injuries like falls, contact with stationary objects and being caught in hinge side of doors reported frequently. Safety education targeting children is seen as an important intervention of children injury prevention for its direct affect. As there has been a rising usage of digital media devices among children, digital media-based learning has been discussed and researched in recent years. However, few has investigated the value of deploying digital devices in children environment safety education. We developed Kinder, a mobile application using Augmented Reality (AR) and object recognition technology, to support preschool children in identifying potentially dangerous objects in different environments. The ultimate goal of Kinder is to provide an interactive and encouraging learning experience for preschool children to foster their learning motivation and enhance their safety knowledge. Our main focus is to assess the usability and prospects of the application. In this paper, we present the methodology, setup, implementation and results of our preliminary assessment of Kinder. From questionnaire and interviews, the preliminary results have shown valid value of AR with object recognition technology in children safety knowledge learning in home and school environment. The present study also provides useful information for practical design in children learning applications.