A web-based painting tool for enhancing student attitudes toward learning art creation

• The developed ePainting tool improves attitudes of elementary-school students toward art creation.
• The ePainting tool provides the functionality required for children to start art creation.
• This tool was much more effective for art creation by males than by females.
• This tool worked best in students with poor initial attitudes toward paper-based art creation.
• The findings demonstrate how ePainting can be used most effectively.

Art education in public elementary schools is generally assigned fewer teaching hours and resources relative to other academic subjects, which has generated concerns about insufficient nurturing of artistic creativity and esthetic sensibility among elementary-school students. This study involved the development of a Web-based tool, named ePainting that facilitates art creation by elementary-school children. A preliminary experimental investigation examined the learning attitudes of students toward overall art creation immediately after using ePainting and the impact on their paper-based art creation at 4 weeks after free-choice learning of ePainting. The results revealed that the overall and paper-based art creation learning attitudes of students were both significantly enhanced after using ePainting. The improvement was greatest among males and those with initially poor-to-moderate learning attitudes toward paper-based art creation. The described results provide useful insights for the further development of teaching strategies and learning content based on the use of new technologies for enhancing art creation learning in schools. We have demonstrated that using the ePainting digital art creation tool as a supplemental free-choice resource is useful for learning traditional paper forms of art creation as well as for enhancing overall learning.