The recent decade has seen increased attention focused on understanding category formation–a cognition ability
of preschool-aged children. Children organize their knowledge about real-world objects by categorizing them
under some common properties or functions. The advancement and popularity of mobile devices with touch
screens provide a good opportunity for young children to learn and practice. In this study, an approach that
models structural and functional categorization knowledge for developing mobile learning systems with dynamic
categorization exemplars is proposed. A mobile application was implemented based on the proposed model for
pre-schoolers (aged 3–6 years). Moreover, the quasi-experimental pre-test and post-test method was used to
evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed knowledge-based application in terms of categorization ability learning.
The results show that the children who experienced dynamically created categorization exemplars from the
modelled knowledge achieved increased scores compared to those who followed the traditional teaching using
books and worksheets.