What is it about?
Most students with specific learning disabilities (SLDs) have difficulties in reading and writing. The SLDs pre-screening is crucial because the golden period for therapy is before six years old. However, many students in Hong Kong receive SLDs assessments after the golden period, or even in the college. As a result, they have higher chance to miss the golden period for early intervention. Also, the SLDs pre-screening is challenging, especially in a language with the logographic script but without prominent sound-script correspondence (e.g., Chinese). To make pre-screening SLDs in Chinese more effective and efficient, we designed a new comprehensive pre-screening game for SLDs in Traditional Chinese (i.e., dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyspraxia). We experimented with students, which showed that our game can effectively pre-screen students with SLDs in Chinese. Ultimately, we want to facilitate the pre-screening process and assessment waiting time of SLDs in Hong Kong.
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Why is it important?
Currently, Hong Kong teachers observe the students’ behaviour and learning performance in schools. To complete an assessment, either Special Education Coordinators (SENCOs) or Educational Psychologists (EPs) need to work with the student on a series of language tests after class. They pre-screen the learning issues caused by SLDs. They need to conduct the test multiple times, each taking a few hours. They also need to collect the evidence during the tests and then forward the student case and the evidence to the education bureau. As a result, many students in Hong Kong receive SLDs assessments after the golden period, or even in the college. They have higher chance to miss the golden period for early intervention. Therefore, we developed a new game to speed up the SLDs pre-screening process. The game contains multiple puzzles. Each puzzle focuses on one or two specific SLDs pre-screening aspects: dyslexia (reading), dysgraphia (writing), and dyspraxia (physical coordination).
Perspectives
Developing this tool from scratch has been a difficult but fun journey for me. The work focuses not only on technical parts such as coding and data analytics, but also design thinking process, visual communication, game user-interface iterations, language-based content design, user experience, student motivation, and task management. Therefore, an interdisciplinary background is essential for this project - Designing a Game for Pre-Screening Students with Specific Learning Disabilities in Chinese. I hope you find this article meaningful. Let's embrace an inclusive, equal, and quality educational opportunity to all lovely kids.
Ka Yan Fung
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Designing a Game for Pre-Screening Students with Specific Learning Disabilities in Chinese, October 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3517428.3550384.
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