Enhancing preschoolers' geometric cognition through mobile educational applications: a comparative study of interface styles

Digital educational applications on mobile devices have great potential for enhancing preschool children's cognitive abilities and have become widely adopted in early childhood education. However, there has been limited research on the differences in cognitive development support provided by teaching applications with different interface styles. This study developed two teaching applications with varying interface styles, stereoscopic and flat. The study used a between-subjects experimental design to explore whether preschool children could develop geometric cognition through these applications and compare knowledge transfer differences across different interface styles. Our findings suggest that well-designed teaching applications can promote children's cognitive development. Notably, there was little difference in performance between the two styles in near and medium transfer tasks. However, children using the stereoscopic learning interface performed better in far transfer tasks. These results demonstrate that the style of the learning interface significantly impacts the effectiveness of teaching applications, with the stereoscopic style yielding superior results in more complex tasks. Furthermore, this study provides valuable insights for developing effective preschool education teaching applications.