Keyboard Design for Pre-School Children

Computers are being used by children as a learning instrument at an incredibly young
age. Many children embark on the adventure of using the keyboard while still pre literate
and unfamiliar with the keyboard. Due to this reason they are unable to interpret the
conventional keyboard configuration or the symbolic representations used on the
keyboard. This would result the child to use up a significant amount of time locating the
keys and correcting unintended strokes which may lead to frustration. Thus, the
conventional computer keyboard design for adults is not suitably or exclusively designed
for the young user. The research is concentrated to design a computer keyboard which is
'more suitable for young children. To carry out the study, the research methodology used
for the project would be the Iterated Waterfall Model. The effects of color in the visual
preferences of pre-school children is examined in a series of experiments conducted with
kindergarten and elementary school students in Malaysia. The results from the
experiments are that children prefer intense colors such as red, blue and yellow. The
study also adds if larger font of the characters would aid the pre-literate children in
recognizing, identifying and distinguishing characters on the computer keyboard. Apart
from that, as children does not fully utilize all the keys on the keyboard, it may be more
reasonable to remove certain keys on the keyboard to help children identifying and
distinguishing the characters on the keyboard better. The results of the study concluded
that children's learning curve is expedited when color, font size and utilization of keys
are put into prospect in the design of the computer keyboard.