Investigation of Mobile Applications for Children to Support the Acquisitions in the Preschool Education Program

Abstract

Nowadays, with the widespread use of mobile devices and the internet, the age range of users has decreased to the preschool period. Games in application stores do not always contain educational content. The content encountered is important for children who spend some of their time playing games on mobile devices. In line with this, the present study aimed to examine the support status of mobile applications for children regarding the acquisitions in the Preschool Curriculum. The sample of the study, in which the document analysis method was employed, consists of 24 mobile applications for children in the Google Play Store. While examining the applications, the data were processed into the Application Review Form created on Google Forms by the researcher, and all the data were analyzed at the end of the review process. According to the study results, it was revealed that the examined mobile applications could support 28 acquisitions out of a total of 63 acquisitions in the Preschool Curriculum and the highest number of supportable acquisitions belonged to the cognitive development domain. It was concluded that mobile applications were insufficient to support the acquisitions in other development domains and mobile applications could be used as an educational tool only for some acquisitions, and suggestions were presented in this direction.