Designing Edutainment Software for Digital Skills Nurturing of Preschoolers. A Method Proposal

The children born nowadays are called digital natives, but their digital skills are under the expectations of the future workforce, which will be tremendously digital. Education has a key role in supporting the development of digital skills even from the early childhood. Designing educational software for preschoolers, that would support learning and digital skills development, needs focus both on children (to ensure engagement) and their instructors (to ensure appropriateness and acceptance). Edutainment software possesses educational content and an entertainment model, being a promising perspective in education support. In this paper we propose a user-centered design method that focuses on both users categories (preschoolers and kindergarten teachers) and that consists of two steps: product development and product validation. A case study of applying and assessing the proposed method to design educational software for preschoolers is also presented.