📝 Abstract

This paper provides an analysis of literature related to the use of mobile devices in teaching young children. For this purpose, the most popular mobile operating systems in Bulgaria are considered and the functionality of the existing mobile applications with Bulgarian interface is discussed. The results of a survey of parents’ views regarding the mobile devices as a learning tool are presented and the ensuing conclusions are provided.

💡 Analysis

This paper provides an analysis of literature related to the use of mobile devices in teaching young children. For this purpose, the most popular mobile operating systems in Bulgaria are considered and the functionality of the existing mobile applications with Bulgarian interface is discussed. The results of a survey of parents’ views regarding the mobile devices as a learning tool are presented and the ensuing conclusions are provided.

📄 Content

(IJCSIS) International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security,
Vol. 14, No. 4, April 2016

Investigating the opportunities of using mobile learning by young children in Bulgaria

Radoslava Kraleva#, Aleksandar Stoimenovski#, Dafina Kostadinova*, Velin Kralev#

Department of Informatics, South West University “Neofit Rilski”, Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria

• Department of Germanic and Romance Studies, South West University “Neofit Rilski”, Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria

Abstract – This paper provides an analysis of literature related to the use of mobile devices in teaching young children. For this purpose, the most popular mobile operating systems in Bulgaria are considered and the functionality of the existing mobile applications with Bulgarian interface is discussed. The results of a survey of parents’ views regarding the mobile devices as a learning tool are presented and the ensuing conclusions are provided.
Keywords – Mobile learning, Mobile learning application, Analysis of the parents’ opinion I. INTRODUCTION Mobile technologies have significantly changed the life of modern society. Nowadays, most people have not only a phone, but most often they use a smart phone, a tablet and computer as well. These devices are considered as mobile devices1 and portable devices2. Mobile devices most often have their own mobile operating system approaching closer to the operating system3 desktop and portable computing devices. These lightweight, comfortable and compact mobile devices are attractive to children. They use them for gaming, watching movies, listening to music, chatting with friends and communicating with the global world. However, all these features are controlled only by a few taps. There is no need to use any additional keyboard or mouse. Children grow up with all these devices around them and acquire their usage before they have started to speak or walk. The rapid development of hardware and software technologies is a prerequisite for many new ways of using them in modern life [1]. This resulted in adopting a new concept in training called ubiquitous learning (U-learning) which combines traditional classroom training and the possibility of

1 Mobile devices – These are all wireless devices with their own operating system, and using Wi-Fi, 3G or 4G internet connection. 2 Portable devices – These are laptops, notebooks, netbooks, ultrabook. 3 Mobile operating systems – Operating systems for mobile devices. access to educational resources on the Web anytime and anywhere [2], [3], [4]. A number of scientists, psychologists, educators and software developers focused their attention on this new kind of education for children based on applications for mobile and portable devices [5]. On this background the main goal of this study is to research and analyze the usage of mobile devices in the education of young children in Bulgaria. The tasks of this study are:  To review the most commonly used mobile operating systems in Bulgaria, as well as the possibility of using the existing applications with interface in the Bulgarian language in the training of young children;  To make an overview of the scientific publications on the topic related to the use of mobile learning;  To analyze the opinions of parents regarding the use of applications for mobile devices in the education of their children in Bulgaria. II. APPLICATIONS FOR MOBILE DEVICES WITH BULGARIAN INTERFACE FOR CHILDREN There are three competing mobile operating systems, Android of Google Inc., Windows Phone and iOS of Microsoft to Apple (Fig. 1) on the Bulgarian markets. Every day users around the world download thousands of apps from the market of these operating systems. Developers rapidly create new and new applications that are added to various markets to meet the needs of consumers. According to the statistics provided by Microsoft last year [7], there were 669,000 applications in the Windows Store and hundreds of new ones were added every day. This is a small number compared to the markets of Google and Apple.

51 https://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis/ ISSN 1947-5500 (IJCSIS) International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security,
Vol. 14, No. 4, April 2016

Figure 1. Selected mobile platforms used by app developers worldwide as of 1st quarter 2014, by region [6] The statistics provided by Gartner Inc. [8] reveals that a large proportion of the downloaded applications belongs to the applications for free downloads versus paid applications (Fig. 2).

Figure 2. The number of downloaded free and paid mobile applications for the period 2012 to 2017 (2017 is predictive) according to Gartner [8]
As it can be seen from the diagram (Fig. 2), most companies and independent developers and users rely on free apps. Often to achieve higher profits other techniques are ap

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