Research On The Design Of Early Childhood Education Software From The Perspective Of Development Suitability

With the rapid development of information technology and its’unique educational value when applied to early education, more and more software development companies focus on the design and development of early childhood educational software. Consequently, numerous early childhood educational software spring up in the market like mushrooms. Due to lack of relevant theoretical knowledge about children education, in the process of software development, the developers pay much more attention to the function and technical features of the software rather than to the development demands of young children. What’s worse, for the sake of gaining profit, the developers developed some software which is full of vulgarity, such as blood and violence. These kinds of software are unsuited for the physical and psychological development of young children. Pre-school is a vital period for the development of young children’s cognition, sociality and emotion, so educational software with poor quality can’t exert the leading and promoting force of information technology in early education, and, on the contrary, it may bring negative effect on young children’s learning and development. Therefore, it is quite necessary to design and develop early childhood educational software on the basis of educational theories.Developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) was proposed by Association of American Preschool Education. The theory, based on respect for children, is a set of educational values to promote young children development. DAP insists on that early childhood education should suit children’s age characteristics, personality and their cultural background, and guarantee the effectiveness of teaching. Similar to the course construction of pre-school education, the design and development of pre-school children’s educational software should follow the educational concept of developmentally appropriate. Only in this way can the pre-school educational software suit and accord with the cognitive characteristics of pre-school children, exert the real advantage of information technology, stimulate children’s interest in study, and promote the pre-school children’ s ability in automatic exploration. Taking the factors mentioned above into consideration, the present study, combining the summary of relevant theoretical studies on early childhood educational software abroad and at home with the author’s previous experience in preschool educational software design and development, aims to probe into the design principles of preschool educational software and proposes some specific designing methods in pre-school educational software development under the guidance of developmentally appropriate practice. With the purpose of the present study, the following works are carried out.First of all, on the basis of looking up, reading and summarizing relevant theoretical and practical studies on early childhood educational software abroad and at home, combing with the author’s previous practical experience of preschool educational software development in research group, the thesis analyzes the problems and deficiency in the present preschool educational software development.Second, it thoroughly analyzes the connotation of developmental adaptability and its’application in practice, and probes into the enlightenment the developmental adaptability carried in preschool educational software development.Third, it analyzes the development demand of pre-school children, the demand of kindergarten courses and the demand of teaching form the perspective of development adaptability, and, combing with the core educational concepts in development adaptability theory, it summarizes the guiding principles which the suitable early childhood educational software should follow.Fourth, based on the previous demand analysis and the designing and guiding principles of suitable pre-school educational software, it constructs the flow chart of early childhood educational software, probes into the specific design methods of early childhood educational, which include the analysis methods of teaching design and the analysis methods of game design.The final work is case analysis. It firstly analyze the Millie’s Math house in the Edmark series of preschool education software to prove the rationality of the specific design methods of early childhood educational software proposed in this study. Then, according to the specific design methods of early childhood educational software proposed in the previous part, it analyzes and summarizes the pre-school educational software named The Frog Princess which was designed in the author’s previous research.It is expected that the design method proposed in this thesis can provide some enlightenment for the further development and design of pre-school educational software. It is also expected that the software developed under the guidance of developmentally appropriate practice can suit the children and assist the educational and teaching activities in kindergartens as well.