Investigating Haptic Guidance Methods for Teaching Children Handwriting Skills

Haptics technologies have the potential to considerably improve the acquisition of handwriting skills by providing physical assistance to improve movement accuracy and precision. To date, very few studies have thoroughly examined the effectiveness of various haptic guidance methods to leverage the acquisition of handwriting skills. In this paper, we examine the role of several methods for haptic guidance, namely full haptic guidance, partial haptic guidance, disturbance haptic guidance, and no-haptic guidance toward improving the learning outcomes of handwriting skills acquisition for typical children. A group of 42 children from Cranleigh School Abu Dhabi across two educational stages, namely Foundation Stage 2 (FS2, 4-5 years old) and Year 2 (6-7 years old), participated in this study. Results showed that disturbance haptic guidance was the most effective for high complexity handwriting tasks (such as writing the letters 'o' and 'g'), partial haptic guidance was the most effective for medium complexity handwriting tasks (such as 't,' 'r,' 's,' 'e,' 'n,' 'a,' and 'b'), and full haptic guidance was the most effective for low complexity letters (such as 'i'). Another interesting finding was that FS2 participants had statistically significant improvement in handwriting speed compared to the Year 2 group, demonstrated by a significantly shorter test completion time. Furthermore, female children performed statistically better than their male counterparts in partial guidance. These results can be utilized to build more effective haptic-based handwriting tools for typical children.