3D Animated Movies, Touch Screen Applications and Visual Motor Development of Five-Year-Old Children

Introduction

Children are increasingly using touch screen devices like tablets and smartphones at preschool during their early education and with family members at home. They are surrounded by digital technologies that were not available a decade ago (Kerawalla & Crook 2002; Buckleitner 2009; Chiong & Shuler 2010; Couse & Chen 2010). The number of hours that children spent in front of screens like computers, smartphones, tablets and game consoles is increasing as well. It’s still argued if it is appropriate for young children to spend hours using technology in front of screens. The answer is yes, if technology is used under control of an adult who has this responsibility with a purpose to promote learning (Lisenbee 2009).

Visual motor skills develop by age since the motor development is integrated to the cognitive development, maturation and practice. A communication between the motor and perceptual systems is necessary for the achievement of visual motor skills. By age three, children start to give meaning to what they see around and when they are at the age of preschool their image library gets richer. When they are at primary school, they learn to write and read the symbols like numbers, alphabet and others (Tükel 2013). A very significant part of cerebral cortex in the human brain is reserved for visual process. The different parts of the brain are developed to achieve different tasks like seeing and perception of color, depth, ground, movement and alike. Seeing has an advantage of getting the environmental information free from distance which is necessary for touching, smelling and tasting. That’s why vision has a superiority and priority in human’s life (Farrori & Menon, 2008). For this reason, the visual perception which forms the basis of cognitive development playing an important role in a child’s reading and writing skills, needs to be reinforced (Feder & Majnemer, 2007; Akı, Aral, Bütün Ayhan & Mutlu, 2008).

Developments of graphical and visual applications were pushed forward first in two dimension, then in three dimension and in virtual reality as the last step (Eden, 2007). The new generation movies are mostly presented in stereo and even the preschool children are subject to 3D vision. This study aims to investigate the effects of 3D animations (stereoscopic) and interactive applications on visual motor development of preschool children. It is expected that the interactive applications and 3D stereoscopic movies developed to this effect, target the child’s audio-visual senses simultaneously and integrate data processing. Nonetheless, these applications and movies develop child’s cognitive skills like evaluation and decision making by including child’s tact to learning process. It is stated that assisting the five sense to have experiences and transferring the experiences to daily life is critical for long lasting learning (Murphy, 2009).