Information Technology Reference
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is a need to make children programming a far more informal, approachable, and
natural activity.
Although, programming activities for children have drawn great interest in the last
years, little information is available on how to introduce computational literacy to
young students taking into account children with special needs and impairments.
Children with disabilities face certain difficulties with the current approaches and
methods to learn programming [3], [4], [10]. In particular, children with Deaf and
Hard of Hearing (DHH) encounter challenges when learning how to code. Teachers
and curriculum designers need to be aware and pay particular attention in these
challenges.
In this paper, we present our experience from a game coding workshop focusing on
children with DHH. With the knowledge extracted from this experience we aim to
explore how design and technology can contribute to improve current learning
practices for the benefit of children with DHH. This paper focuses on our efforts to
develop a coding workshop that will allow DHH children to overcome their
difficulties and explore their potential interest in game development and coding.
Hence, we provide some first insights on:
How to design environments for facilitating
coding for children with hearing impairments?
In our efforts to investigate how game coding workshops could be designed to
allow DHH children to overcome their difficulties, we designed, implemented, and
evaluated a workshop program of 12 children with DHH. After the workshop, we
organized a focus group with experts in DHH in order to capture their ideas and
experiences with regard to the game coding workshop. Next, we employed a content
analysis technique [11] in order to organize the data. As the final step of the process
we used the structured data and derived guidelines for improving the design of the
game coding workshop that address DHH difficulties.
2
Background
DHH is an impairment that can result from many reasons at different ages. DHH
Children are a challenging target group for designers [8] [10]. Not only because it is
harder to design environments for children rather than adults [9], but the fact that
these children have DHH creates even more designing particularities. Most children
today have hearing aid or a cochlear implant, but they do have special communication
needs. In fact they can communicate orally, but only to a certain extent [12]. Often
they miss a fluent mother tongue, which results in a lack of written and spoken
language skills [12]. The primary form of communication within the deaf children is
the sign language [1]. Sign language is not a visual form of the respective language
(in our case Norwegian) but it is a different language with its own unique
grammatical and syntactical structure.
Therefore, the lack of written and spoken language skills, which is common in
children with DHH, has an impact on how they can be involved in different learning
contexts [10] and therefore how these contexts can be designed.
