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2011-09-26

iPad App for Fine Motor Exercises - My Take on Dexteria

The claim: The exercises are designed to be repeatable and engaging, and when used on a regular basis will help fine motor skills improve over time.

I finally got to it. I was expecting more options; there are only 3 exercises, pinching the frogs, tapping the shapes while keeping the thumb down on the screen, and tracing the letters. Considering that I am going to use this with my preschoolers on the autism spectrum, I think that:

The pinching is a great exercise, but the feedback is uninteresting, so I question that most of the kids I work with would be motivated to keep at it. To make the crabs disappear the child has to pinch precisely, the fingers have to start slightly away from the frog, not already on top, which is good to make sure they get the right exercise. The feedback for pinching correctly is a brief sound and the crab disappearing. Let's see how many kids will make progress and "master" the exercise - as we pinch all the crabs away a new screen comes up with more crabs that move around, and the app keeps score on the number of crabs and time to finish each level. Unfortunately for one person at a time only. At Level 5 some f the crabs turn red and I really liked the noise they made when I pinched them and I pinched 2 or three before I realized that it made more crabs appear! So the fun feedback slows down the progress score-wise, but I guess that if the goal is to repeat the finger movement to improve the hand performance, then it is OK to that. However the speed score will be compromised if you are keeping score. I would be more interested in testing the improvement on some other task after x time pinching crabs to assess the improvement.

My favorite one was the tracing. A tiny arrow indicates where to start and blue dots where to go. There are blue dots all along the traceable area of the letters, less dots for straight lines and more dots for curves. The feedback here is excellent, as long as you get a child motivated to finish the tracing, which is seeing the blue trace cover the letter and the new letter appear. There is sound feedback for correct tracing and arriving at each blue dot, and a voice saying "start from the arrow dot" for incorrect tracing. Tracing anywhere on the screen that is not the right response, does not trace with the blue line.

The last exercise has the child calibrate the app by placing the hand on the hand shadow on the screen and then shapes appear randomly where each of the other fingers should go, and they disappear when they are tapped. It will be difficult to have many kids hold the thumb down and not use any but the correct of the other 4 fingers to tap the appearing shapes. But neat exercise.


Dexteria video review by http://a4cwsn.com/ from marc rosete on Vimeo.