Designing Educational Games for Children with Specific Learning Difficulties: Insights from Involving Children and Practitioners

Abstract

Children with dyslexia and attention deficit disorders often have problems in short term memory, yet can benefit from learning strategies for remembering. In this paper, we describe the design of a multimedia educational game called Memory Challenge to help children with Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLDs) learn strategies for memory and to develop their cognitive skills. We focus in our approach on the involvement of children with SpLDs and domain specialists and practitioners in the design process. Involving various participants from our target population (native Arabic-speaking users) in different stages of our design process was effective in obtaining an insight into the needs of people with SpLDs and has contributed to the design with actionable implications.