Beyond tapping and swiping: Justin Ukaegbu’s vision for movement-based learning

Justin Ukaegbu is a design leader working across product, interaction, and brand systems, with over a decade of experience spanning the UK, Nigeria, and international markets. His work examines how design influences behaviour at scale, with expertise across digital products, communication systems, and innovation-led programmes. He holds an MA in Graphic Design with Distinction from the University of Hertfordshire and is a member of the Design Research Society. His portfolio includes large-scale international programmes, fintech product leadership, and award-winning digital platforms. More recently, he has developed Draw in the Air, a browser-based learning system that enables children to trace letters and shapes using hand movement in front of a webcam. In this interview with CHISOM MICHAEL, he discusses how movement-based learning can improve children’s writing development, why current screen-based tools may be limiting physical skills, and how Draw in the Air is redefining digital learning through gesture and accessibility.

You argue that early learning begins with physical movement rather than screens. What did you observe that led you to question the current direction of digital learning?

It wasn’t one single moment. It built up over time. My first degree was in Computer Science and Education at Enugu State University of Science and Technology. So I’ve had both of those worlds in my head for a long time, technology and how people learn. I went on to study Graphic Design, MA level at the University of Hertfordshire, and that’s where I really started thinking about interaction as a design problem. After that, over twelve years of professional practice across products, brands, and platforms. I’ve designed interfaces that people tap, swipe, and scroll through. That’s what most of my career has looked like.

But when I started paying closer attention to how young children interact with screens, something felt off. I watched kids using educational apps, and they were completing tasks, getting the right answers, and moving through levels. On paper, it looked like learning. But if you really watched them, their hands weren’t doing much. A tap here. A drag there. The whole body was still. The whole experience was passive.

And then separately, I started reading about declining handwriting ability in young children. Teachers are talking about weaker grip strength. Kids are struggling to hold a pencil properly. I’m someone who studied education and then spent a career designing how people interact with things. That combination made it hard to look away from the problem. That’s where the question started. Not from theory. From watching.

How has the shift toward tapping and swiping-based tools affected children’s development of writing skills?

Think about what a tap actually requires from a child. Almost nothing physically. You touch a surface, and something happens. There’s no resistance. No effort. No control needed.

Now think about what writing requires. Grip. Pressure. Direction. Coordination between what the eye sees and what the hand does. Those are skills that develop through repetition and physical practice. You can’t shortcut them.

When the primary mode of interaction becomes tapping, children get very good at tapping. But the muscles and coordination needed for writing don’t develop at the same pace. It’s not that screens are harmful in some dramatic way. It’s that they’re replacing time that used to be spent doing things that built those physical foundations.

The tool became easier. But the child didn’t get stronger.

Teachers are beginning to notice changes in fine motor skills. How serious is this issue, and what does it mean for early literacy?

It’s serious enough that whole countries are changing policy over it. Sweden reversed parts of its screen-first approach in schools. France tightened restrictions on devices in classrooms.

These aren’t small decisions. Governments don’t change education policy on a hunch.

What teachers are describing is consistent. Children arriving in classrooms with less hand strength, less coordination, less confidence with a pencil. And that feeds directly into literacy. If forming a letter feels difficult or uncomfortable, a child hesitates. If they hesitate enough, they disengage. It’s not that they can’t learn. It’s that the physical entry point has become harder because they haven’t had enough practice with that kind of movement.

I don’t think this is a crisis in the dramatic sense. But it is a real, measurable shift. And it’s one that the tools we design are contributing to.

What happens to a child’s learning process when movement becomes central again through gesture instead of touch?

Something changes in the child’s attention. That’s the first thing you notice.

When a child taps a screen, the feedback is instant, and the effort is minimal. They move through things quickly. With a gesture, they have to slow down. They have to think about the shape before they move. They raise their hand, they commit to a direction, they adjust mid-movement.

There’s a real sense of trying.

I’ve watched children use Draw in the Air, and the moment that strikes me every time is the pause before they start. They look at the letter. They think. Then they move. And when they get it right, you can see it register physically. Their posture changes. There’s this small moment of pride that you don’t get from tapping the correct answer on a screen.

That’s what movement does. It makes the learning feel earned.

How important is accessibility in shaping the future of learning tools like Draw in the Air that remove the need for hardware and installation?

It’s everything. Honestly. If this only worked on expensive tablets or needed specialised equipment, it wouldn’t matter how good the idea was. Most schools don’t have a spare budget for new hardware. Most families aren’t buying dedicated learning devices.

That was a design decision from the start. It had to run in a browser. It had to work with a standard webcam. No app store. No installation. No IT department needed to set it up. A teacher opens a browser, points a webcam at the child, and it works.

I grew up in Nigeria. I studied there. My first degree was from Enugu State University of Science and Technology. I know what it looks like when technology requires infrastructure that isn’t there. I’ve seen brilliant tools that never reach the children who need them most because the barrier to entry is too high. I wasn’t going to build another one of those.

If a school has a laptop with a camera, they can use it easily. What trade-offs were made to keep a system described as simple by design so focused?

A lot of saying no.

There’s a temptation when you’re building something like this to add more. More features. More content. More gamification. Leaderboards, rewards, characters, storylines. All of that is standard in edtech, and all of it would have diluted what actually matters.

The core of this is hand movement and letter formation. That’s it. The moment you start adding layers on top, the child’s attention shifts from the movement to the reward. And then you’re back to the same problem. The child is engaged, but not in the part that develops them.

I also chose not to build a native app. That would have given me more control over the experience, but it would have created a barrier. Browser-first was harder to design for in some cases, but it was the right call for reach.

The trade-off is that it looks less impressive on a feature list. But it works better in a classroom.

I’ll take that every time.

How do you see the relationship between formal education and home learning evolving, given a product that works in both classrooms and at home?

The gap between school and home has always been there. But the tools have never really bridged it well. Schools use one set of systems. Parents use whatever they can find on the app store. There’s very little continuity.

What I find interesting about Draw in the Air is that the same experience works in both settings without adaptation. A teacher uses it during a phonics session. A parent opens it on a laptop in the living room. The child does the same thing in both places. The learning carries over.

That’s not something I designed deliberately at first. It came from the simplicity. Because there’s no complex setup, no login system, no curriculum integration required, it just works wherever there’s a screen and a webcam. And that accident turned out to be one of the most important things about it.

I think the future of early learning tools is exactly this. Things that don’t belong to school or home. They just belong to the child.

Some countries are rethinking screen use in education. How does your work fit into this wider shift in learning policy and practice?

I think the policy shift validates the instinct I had when I started building this. The conversation is moving away from “more screens, more apps, more digital” and toward “what kind of digital interaction actually helps?”

Draw in the Air fits into that because it doesn’t ask you to choose between digital and physical. It uses a screen, but the interaction is physical. The child isn’t sitting passively.

They’re standing, moving, forming shapes with their body. The screen is just a mirror.

I’m not anti-screen. That’s a lazy position. Screens are tools. The question is what you ask the child to do with them. And right now, most tools ask very little physically. I think the next generation of learning technology will ask more. Not less digital. Better digital.

What specific behaviours in young learners are you trying to reshape through your design-focused work?

Three things, really.

First, the physical passivity. I want children to move when they learn. Not sit still and tap. Movement is how the body learns. If we design tools that remove movement, we’re working against how children naturally develop.

Second, the relationship with effort. Tapping gives you instant success. There’s almost no failure state. But learning to write is full of failure. You get the shape wrong. You try again. Your hand doesn’t do what your brain wants. That friction is where growth happens. I want to keep that friction in the experience, not design it out.

Third, and this is more personal, I want to change the assumption that digital learning has to look a certain way. Bright colours, cartoon characters, reward sounds. That’s not learning design. That’s attention design. There’s a difference. I want to build tools where the learning

itself is the thing that holds the child’s attention. Not the packaging around it.

Looking ahead, what would success mean for Draw in the Air, not just as a product, but as part of a broader change in how children learn to write?

Success for the product is straightforward. Schools are using it. Children are benefiting from it. Teachers are seeing results. That’s measurable, and I’m working toward it.

But the bigger success would be if this changes the conversation about what early learning tools should do. Right now, the default assumption is that digital learning means screen interaction.

Tapping, swiping, watching. If Draw in the Air helps shift that default, even slightly, toward movement-based interaction, that matters more than any single product.

I’d like to see gesture-based learning become a category, not just a novelty. Not just Draw in the Air, but other designers and developers are looking at this space and asking the same question:

What if the child moved?

Ultimately, I didn’t build this to win a market. I studied computer science and education. I spent over a decade designing products, brands and systems. Then I did a master’s in design and started asking harder questions about interaction. All of that led here. I built it because I looked at how we were teaching children and thought we could do better. If it pushes even a few people to rethink that, it’s done its job.