As a professor in reading and children’s media, I often get the chance to work with developers to bring digital books to life. The idea sounds simple: take a beloved print book and add gentle animations that spark a little extra magic. After all, what author doesn’t dream of seeing their characters dance on the page or objects shimmer into motion, making the story’s world feel even more alive?
There is little point in pitting one format against the other, print or digital. Each has its own strengths (and drawbacks!). The real question is how to design each in the most effective, research-based way to support comprehension. Understanding the story really is the most important part of the design, because if a child can’t follow what’s happening, then all the fun extra features don’t really matter.
Sometimes designers and developers get carried away by all the possibilities of interactivity, adding so many features that the reader becomes overwhelmed. Every digital book is different, but there are some common mistakes that are easy to avoid if we want to help children understand the story.
Recently, my team conducted a meta-analysis (an analysis of analyses) that allowed us to identify a set of common, evidence-backed features that genuinely support comprehension, and those that do not.
Findings from the meta-analysis
Overall, we found that some features enhance understanding by helping children focus on the storyline, while others unintentionally distract them and overload their cognitive resources. The clearest pattern across studies is that the type of interactivity can determine whether comprehension improves or declines.
Mini-games
One of the clearest findings comes from studies on mini-games. These are small interactive elements, such as drawing or colouring activities, embedded within the story, where the child can “play” while reading. Across four separate investigations, mini-games consistently had negative effects on story comprehension. They tended to appear in titles where children could, for example, play a puzzle between story pages, complete isolated skill tasks, or engage in reward-based game mechanics, all of which distracted from the narrative flow.
From a cognitive standpoint, these mini-games introduce what Mayer’s multimedia learning theory calls extraneous load: additional mental effort that is unrelated to the story. When children shift their attention to beating a game level or earning a reward, their working memory becomes occupied with non-story information. This makes it harder for them to keep track of plot events or characters’ motivations.
For developers, the takeaway is clear: even small “breakout” games actively compete for cognitive resources needed for deep story processing, and they should be avoided.
Mimicking actions
In contrast, the most effective digital books included interactions that required children to mirror the protagonist’s actions. In one example, a digital book required the child to press the same dashboard button the character pressed in the story without knowing what would happen next. This small but meaningful gesture increased empathy and emotional engagement, allowing children to feel what the character felt. This aligns with the embodiment principle, which argues that learning strengthens when children mentally and physically simulate the events they are reading about. These features help children integrate personal experience with story experience, making it easier to draw inferences and understand character motivation. For app designers, I would therefore recommend interactions that move the story forward and deepen identification with the character, because these are the ones that enhance comprehension.
Questions
In addition to the strong findings on mini-games and protagonist-aligned interactions, we also examined the role of questions, since these are common in many children’s digital books. Indeed, publishers often assume that adding questions while a child is reading will automatically improve understanding. But we found that their effectiveness really depends on the type of question. Designing prompts that help requires careful placement and limited frequency, and even then, the benefits are modest. When the story pauses so the child can answer a question, it shifts them from “story mode” to “quiz mode.” This interruption breaks their narrative immersion, or what researchers call narrative transportation, which is the feeling of being mentally absorbed in the story world.
Hotspots
Lastly, we looked at hotspots, which are tappable areas that trigger animations, sounds, or vocabulary explanations. These showed almost no impact on comprehension. In many cases, the hotspots were unrelated to the story and actually drew the child’s attention away from the narrative. In a few instances, they did support vocabulary learning, but they still didn’t meaningfully improve overall story understanding.
Optimistic outlook
There was one very positive finding in our study, which makes me proud of how far our research field has come and optimistic about the future of children’s digital books. Our analysis has systematically shown that over time, digital books have clearly evolved. Earlier titles (before 2016) often included flashy but irrelevant features like random hotspots and mini-games, which frequently disrupted children’s understanding of the story. But more recent digital books (after 2019) show a clear shift toward meaningful, narrative-driven interactions, especially those that draw children more deeply into the protagonist’s experience. These newer, more thoughtful design approaches consistently lead to stronger comprehension outcomes.
As researchers, we have been advocating for stronger partnerships between designers, developers, publishers, and researchers since the early 2000s, when the first digital books appeared on the market. Those early products were often very poor quality, essentially just scanned pages placed on a screen. But today we see major improvements and much closer alignment between digital book features and what research shows actually supports children’s learning.
We continue to promote these collaborations through the International Centre for EdTech Impact, where we connect academics with designers to work on research-based design. We are increasingly seeing how these partnerships are paying off for children across the world. It is also encouraging to see philanthropic organisations funding this kind of work, such as the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Sandbox for Literacy Innovations initiative, which I am involved in. With meaningful collaboration between research and design, we can create higher-quality tools that genuinely support children’s learning.
Professor Natalia I. Kucirkova is the Director of the International Centre for EdTech Impact, a global not-for-profit centre of excellence that connects EdTech companies with more than 1,200 learning-science experts for rigorous evaluation, implementation support, and tailored technical assistance. Under her leadership, the Centre conducts standards-aligned research to ensure that next-generation EdTech is evidence-based, equitable, and grounded in the science of learning.
