Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
We start with a compact overview of most relevant deaf studies for deaf indi-
viduals, focusing on deaf children. The overview highlights what we know and we
do not know from the literature about the characteristics of deaf people and rele-
vant for designing games for deaf children. With the goal of learning more about
such an issue, we conducted experiments with deaf children, their teachers and
experts of deafness for the TERENCE European project [23], which is developing
video games for improving the reading comprehension of children, like deaf child-
ren. In particular, the TERENCE consortium run field studies with children as
subjects and their referent adults as informants. We designed the tasks of the field
study with children as paper-and-pencil games, collected the results of the games
and also observed children while playing with them. The state-of-the-art analysis
and the results of the field studies run for TERENCE, allow us to compile a set of
guidelines for the design of games for deaf children, which is the focus of the third
and final part of the paper.
2
Research Findings
In this section, we analyse the most relevant needs of deaf children for playing
video-games and, mainly, concerning reading, attention and memory. The needs
emerge from an analysis of the deaf literature and recent findings of the
TERENCE project [23]. TERENCE is developing an adaptive learning system for
improving the reading comprehension of primary-school children, hearing and
deaf, by means of stories and smart games for reasoning about stories. In order to
understand the needs of children for reading and playing with the TERENCE sys-
tem, the TERENCE consortium run studies following the
user-centred design
(UCD) [18]: the consortium conducted expert-based studies, with experts of the
domain or UCD as participants, and user-based studies, in which the participants
were children, hearing and deaf, and their referent adults, like class teachers, sup-
port teachers and parents. The studies were done firstly for (1) the context of use
analysis and secondly for (2) the evaluation of prototypes of the system. The first
studies were done for analysing the impact on the design of the system (a) of the
characteristics of the users, (b) of the tasks they can perform with the system like
playing computer games, and (c) of the environment. The data collection involved
592 7-11 olds across UK and Italy, 70 out of which are deaf, and about 30 referent
adults, that are parents of children, class teachers or support teachers. Data collec-
tion activities with children were in the form paper-based games, and data collec-
tion with adults was done via contextual inquiries, questionnaires or diaries. Direct
observations complemented all data collection activities in situ. See [24]. The re-
sults were picked up for designing the TERENCE system, in particular, its smart
games and the related interface for playing with them. The resulting high-fidelity
prototype, realised in Flash, was then evaluated in the second studies, that is, us-
ability testing sessions of c.a 1 hour each. Tasks with the prototype were analysed
Search WWH ::
Custom Search