Young children's storybook searching with a visualized search interface

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore how young children interact with a visualized search interface to search for storybooks by assembling the provided visual searching items and to explore the difference in visual search behaviours and strategies exhibited by pre-schoolers and second-graders. Design/methodology/approach - The visualized search interface was used to help young children search for storybooks by dragging-and-dropping story characters, scene objects and colour icons to perform search queries. Twenty pre-schoolers and 20 second-graders were asked to finish a search task through the visualized search interface. Their activities and successes in performing visual searches were logged for later analysis. Furthermore, in-depth interviews were also conducted to research their cognitive strategies exhibited while formulating visual search queries. Findings - Young children with different grades adopted different cognitive strategies to perform visual searching. In contrast to the pre-schoolers who performed visual searching by personal preference, the second-graders could exercise visual searching accompanied with relatively high-order thinking. Young children may also place different foci on the storybook structure to deal with conditional storybook queries. The pre-schoolers tended to address the characters in the story, whereas the second-graders paid much attention to the aspects of scene and colour. Originality/value - This paper describes a new visual search approach allowing young children to search for storybooks by describing an intended storybook in terms of its characters, scenes or the background colours, which provides valuable indicators to inform researchers of how pre-schoolers and second-graders formulate concepts to search for storybooks.