A case study: Exploring video deficit effect in 2-year-old children's playing and learning with an iPad

This paper examined 2-year-olds' playing with an iPad and whether there is a video deficit effect, that young children learn less from an iPad than from a live demonstration. Observational case study has been used in this study.This paper made three important contributions, which include a) there was a video deficit effect, which exists at least before the child turned 3 years old and it was found young children (2-year-olds)'s poorer ability to learn from 2D sources (iPad) to real-life situation, in comparison to their ability to learn from a live demonstration, b) 2-years-olds could not draw a whole cat image, owing to that children's understanding from playing theiPad game was linked with their thinking, talking and reading from the images and iPad games only provided children with higher task complexity and disrupt their transferring of learning; and c) 2-year-olds needed to develop their experience with multiple representations, such as language cues, to facilitate their transferring of learning. Parents and teachers may find this paper useful to examine the values of using 2D sources, such as an iPad.