Play-Draw-Write: usability and acceptance of a tablet app for the early screening of handwriting difficulties in kindergartners

Dysgraphia is a Learning Disability that prevents from mastering handwriting. It is belatedly diagnosed, with negative consequences on children’s life. To anticipate Dysgraphia screening to a pre-literacy age, we present Play-Draw-Write, a tablet-based application designed to assess handwriting-related features, starting from drawing. It focuses on different aspects of graphical gesture production, such as rhythmicity and speed-accuracy tradeoff, but also to the possible alteration which might occur in gesture production itself, in free drawing. Preliminary inspection of quantitative parameters extracted from the app games suggests their potential in detecting children considered at risk of developing delays in graphical abilities, according to their teachers’ judgement. In this work, we focus on children’s opinion in terms of system acceptance and usability, to enable a longitudinal monitoring through our app and a better evaluation of the direction of possible corrections. Results from usability and acceptance questionnaires on 177 children revealed that they liked playing with the app, and wish to use it again, even when encountering some difficulties. These results are a first step toward an early, easy, and broad screening of Dysgraphia, before handwriting is learnt.