OntoCog: A Knowledge Based Approach for Preschool Cognitive Skills Learning Application

In present work, the theoretical and development details of a child-friendly mobile application to enhance cognitive skills of preschool students are presented. Cognitive skills are a vital part of the curriculum at all level of education especially preschool learning. Currently considerable numbers of mobile applications are available for child learning that claim educational goals but they only dispense information without considering pedagogical theories and models. In contrast those applications that were primarily developed to achieve educational goals are only available to a selected audience mainly researchers. Also the nature of existing mobile application is static content delivery in which previously created contents are stored for repetitive use. This static nature jeopardized individualized and cognitive skills learning. The objectives of the present work is to overcome this static nature of content delivery by proposing a knowledge model named OntoCog with mobile application for dynamic content creation that follows constructive pedagogical theories. A mobile application named Cognitive Skills (CogSkills) is developed to evaluate proposed model. As a result the dynamic nature of the CogSkills provides a clear advantage over existing static nature mobile applications. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.