AN EVALUATION OF PUPPETRY ON ENHANCING PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIP AND ENGAGEMENT IN DIGITAL CHILDREN PICTURE BOOK DESIGN

Reading is fundamental to learning. The first books that children exposed to are usually picture books read by their parents. A recent survey done in Hong Kong showed that 89.9% of children wished their parents would read story books with them, but many of those families only spent 30 minutes weekly or less on parent child reading activities. While the popularity of smartphones and tablets led many children to be absorbed into games and entertainment apps which seldom involved parent-child interaction, this portable platform could, on the other hand, be an opportunity for deploying digital picture books with play elements that help engaging both parents and children and improve their relationships. To investigate how play elements in digital picture book could enhance child-parent relationship, two sets of digital picture book prototypes were built from the same printed picture story book, one with the typical multimedia features like read aloud narrative and animation as the control experiment, and another with an extra puppetry feature that allowed children and parents to play act the characters in the story. The two prototypes were given to different child-parent pairs for reading in their homes or at a private corner of the library. Audio records of the reading sessions were captured and the parents were asked to complete exit questionnaires. Results of the data were then analysed against the engagement of the child as well as the quality of parent-child relationship, which is factored into parent-child dyadic interaction including affect, intimacy, control problems and the quality of instruction. Questionnaire findings showed that while parents considered their children more engaged and demonstrated more self esteem in the puppetry picture book activity, they didn't think that it helped building a more positive parent-child dyadic interaction. Audio record analysis, on the contrary, hinted that the puppetry picture book activity yielded more positive parent-child dyadic interaction, in addition to gaining more engagement from the children.