[Xmca-l] Psychology of handwriting -- mobile app.

[Huw Lloyd]

 Dear All

I am writing a smart-phone / tablet application for practising handwriting
and related activities and have a few questions (below) which some of you
may have some feeling for.

The initial audience I had in mind for the application are children of
adults owning ipads and the like.  There are, I am aware, numerous issues
and scope for criticism with respect to promoting this kind of application
and pastime.  However, given that there is a young user base for tablets, I
reason that we might as well embrace the technology and try to put forward
some good products, rather than the 'pop the balloon' games that, I
imagine, populate many of these mobile devices.  I am currently at the
stage of implementing the main psychological component of the application,
which will initially be reminiscent of experiments undertaken by Gal'perin.

What I am hoping for is to gather a large set of longitudinal
transcriptions of writing fluency across a potentially rather wide user
base (i.e anyone with a smart phone/tablet), in order to undertake a robust
microgenetic study of the development in handwriting and the analytical
skills that accompany it.  It is my also my thought that this study will
serve as a good exemplary model for applying the genetic analysis that I
have been sketching out.

Given the challenges of implementing the application, I have not spent much
time trying to find out what presently exists within the apps domain or,
indeed, whether the psychological research has begun to embrace such
devices for collating data.

Here are my questions:

1.  What's already out there in the mobile apps world?  Are they informed
by any psychological theory?

2.  Under what circumstances would you use or experiment with such an
application?  E.g. Does it need to be freely available or would a small
cost be indicative of quality?

3.  Are there any high profile studies of the psychology of handwriting
that you would want, or expect, the application design to be informed by?
Presently I am working along the lines delineated by Gal'perin, though I
hope to return soon to see what Luria has written about this too.

4.  Is this the sort of experiment that merits publication in a particular
journal?  It is my hope that I will get several papers published from this
effort as a whole.

Best,
Huw