Analyzing Children's Viewing Behaviors in Science Demonstrations with and without Interactive E-Book Support

This study explored the impact of interactive e-books on the viewing behaviors of children in science demonstrations at museums. To conduct this study, an interactive e-book on a pendulum experiment was developed and integrated into a physical science demonstration at a museum. Two scientific demonstrations were conducted in this study. The first demonstration was conducted using the conventional science demonstration method, without integrating the interactive e-book into the demonstration. The second was a science demonstration with an integrated interactive e-book. The study analyzed and compared the children's learning motivation, viewing behaviors, and knowledge gained in both demonstrations. The results showed that the different science demonstrations did not significantly affect the children's current knowledge gain or learning motivation. However, the sequence analysis revealed that in the conventional science demonstration without the interactive e-book, children were more engaged in observing the science demonstration, experiment, and instrument operation and interacting with neighboring viewers. In contrast, in the science demonstration with the integration of the interactive e-book, children had more physical involvement, including pointing at the answers in the e-book, swinging their arms with the pendulum animation, and nodding when confused about the expected results. In addition, the children who joined the demonstration with the interactive e-book made more attempts to learn about procedural knowledge. These results demonstrated that both learning modes have similar learning effects on children, indicating the feasibility of the two learning modes. Furthermore, the results revealed that children's needs might differ when engaged in different modes of science demonstrations; for example, conventional modes need more support from companions, whereas e-book modes need more children's physical participation.