MaGrid: A Language-Neutral Early Mathematical Training and Learning Application

Abstract

Given that the use of educational technologies is increasingly popular in kindergarten and among young students, these technologies have been shown to be able to solve the difficulties (existing in school) that are either not possible to be solved in traditional schooling or cost a lot of time and resources. In this paper, we present a pedagogical training and learning application called MaGrid (Math on Grid), which has been developed to foster early mathematical skills in pre-schoolers. MaGrid is a tablet-based application, which provides a wide range of training tasks targeting fundamental mathematical concepts for the preschool level. The language-neutral property of MaGrid is an innovative aspect that makes MaGrid different from existing mathematical training applications. This property may reduce the barrier of language from mathematical education for second language learners encountered in multilingual school settings. MaGrid allows individual learning in an interactive way and provides real-time feedback. Moreover, MaGrid is capable of recording students’ activities while working on the training tasks, which can help teachers and parents keep track of a student’s progress in different tasks and observe potential training-related improvements over time. Finally, we describe a series of experiments carried out using the MaGrid application during special training and assessment sessions in several preschools in Luxembourg.