Pencilplay Beta – What’s this all about?

If you’ve downloaded Pencilplay, you will see that it currently has just one feature – Artwork management. So what’s this all about, you say? If I wanted a photo album manager, I would have stuck to Google Photos.

But wait. This isn’t just any picture manager – It’s an Artwork Tracker.

What does the Artwork tracker do?

Pencilplay treats children’s artworks as one of 6 different development indicators. The tracker intelligently identifies each artwork that you upload as belonging to a specific child-development stage. When enough artworks have been uploaded (27 currently) the tracker begins to analyse the child’s artwork for specific abilities such as fine-motor skills, visual-spatial skills as regards depth, contour and form etc. which we use to provide parents with a monthly report of the child’s development.

Although with Pencilplay Beta – for now – you can only upload artworks, and reports are not yet visible. We expect to launch this on 14th of November – Children’s Day.

The relevance of Children’s Drawings as Indicators

Pencilplay considers children’s drawings as an important artefact or evidence of  development, although always backed by observational data.  Treating Children’s Art as an  indicator of development is not new.  Piaget (1956) argued that a child’s drawing  performance reflected the child’s cognitive competence (although he did not consider drawing to be a special domain of development, but merely a window into the child’s general cognitive development.)

Other children’s drawing theories that explain the growth of perception through drawing include Arnheim’s Perceptual Theory and Jane McFee’s Perceptual Delineation Theory – although all of them consider drawing as an indicator, a view into the child’s cognitive and social development.

Take a look at each of the Art stages that a child goes through. (Viktor Lowenfeld’s Stages of Artistic Development.)