Spelling their pictures: the role of visual scaffolds in an authoring app for young children's literacy and creativity

Children as authors and creators need to be supported at all stages of literacy development. This paper presents Picture-Blocks (PB) - a constructionist mobile app that allows children (ages 5-9) to create personally meaningful digital pictures while exploring spelling and vocabulary concepts in an open-ended manner. In PB, children can spell any number of picture objects (sprites) into existence, that they can use to make a picture composition and share with friends. PB also suggests semantically similar sprites, allowing children to explore related objects and discover new words. We evaluated the app by running an exploratory pilot with 14 children over a two weeks in-the-wild deployment. Qualitative and quantitative examples suggest that our design of the visual scaffolding interactions facilitated (i) high engagement and a sense of authorship via created pictures, (ii) instances of spelling corrections and vocabulary explorations (iii) digitally mediated social interaction and remixing. We present our findings of children's interactions and creations, while discussing implications for designers and developers of literacy technologies.