ABOUT THE PROJECT
The project Learning games for Dyslexic young adults is co funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.
Agreement No. : 2018-1-LV01-KA204-046970
The aim of the project is the provision of a range of mobile highly motivating and stimulating learning games for a carefully selected range of skills known to be important for young dyslexic adults.
A dyslexic person needs to train his or her perception skills on a regular base, otherwise all inclusive education measures, for example, in VET, higher education or adult continuing training, may fail. Such training is a prerequisite for phonological and orthographic processing. Inclusive learning requires accessibility of individual learning resources (for example, digital learning tools tailored to general or specific learning needs) to learn in a variety of ways that compensates deficiencies. Interactive exercises can help dyslexic persons to train specific skills. Such exercises are available, but the majority of them are focused on children and do not usually address specific problems. Not surprisingly, young dyslexic adults do not like these exercises due to their childish nature or because they are seen as irrelevant. Therefore, there is a need for training tools that consider and address the preferences of young dyslexic adults from the age of 16 onwards. And usually such training has to take place in the afternoon or evening (outside of formal education institutions) and has to be provided by teachers/trainers specialised on dyslexia.
The successful GRUNDTVIG projects EDYSGATE (2008) and DYS 2.0 (2011) tackeld this challenge by providing learning games for dyslexic youngsters on the Window platform. These learning games won 2009 the Austrian Multimedia Prix /category social service and the World Summit Award 2009/ category E-Learning/Education. However, there is a growing request for a mobile version of the games.
Mobile devices have indeed become immensely powerful (not only from a technical point of view) and popular especially with young adults and offer huge opportunities for learning "anywhere and anytime" especially for our target group. The current games are provided online via internet browsers and were designed to work on a desktop computer with keyboard and mouse and a relatively large screen. Therefore, it is necessary to transfer the learning games in such a way that:
- once the app is downloaded, an internet connection is not required anymore (learning "anywhere and anytime")
- the user interface is adapted to smaller screens
- touch screen features are supported
- the app design becomes really intuitive (no questions asked)
DYS2GO will meet this need and addresses both teachers/trainers as well as dyslexic young adults.
The focus will be on the following 7 areas:
- Visual discrimination,
- Visual memory,
- Visual sequence,
- Auditory discrimination,
- Auditory memory,
- Auditory sequence,
- Spatial position (e.g. top, bottom, behind, ahead, left, right).
The games will be available for mobile devices (Android, Apple IOS) as well as for Windows desktop (also planned Windows tablets). The DYS2GO games will be mini-learning games based on perception training approaches for Special Education Needs (SEN). The learning game apps will be accompanied by a teacher's guide on how to use the apps in the classroom. Apps and teacher's guide will be available for free in English, German, Latvian, Czech, Lithuanian, and Bulgarian language.