Senior project: Suno
The application I worked on for my senior project is meant to improve the reading experience for children with dyslexia and other learning disabilities. The way my group and I chose to go about this was through a tangible storytelling process, where children progress through different stories and learn words through these. The initial stage involves a basic letter identification level employing a confusion matrix, with later phases incorporating these words into the storytelling process.
While the current story is a popular folk tale (The Little Red Hen), our plan was to eventually use local folk tales to appeal to children.
Phase 1: Learning
The learning component of the app introduces the difficult words in a story (identified based on examples of letter-identification dyslexia and letter-position dyslexia). The method we applied here is adapted from the Graphogame method, where users are given multiple choices of letters or words to select from and select the correct one based on an audio recording. These words are shown in groups of three with two similar words (words with one letter changed or letter position changed), and audio of the word is played.
Phase 2: Testing
The testing component of the app tests the words learned in the previous stage of the game. Here, the player is given the incentive to continue through the combination of a story and a tangible board game.
The board contains pictures corresponding to each of the words learned in the previous stage, and when a word is shown on the screen, the player is asked to click the corresponding image on the board. Upon correct selection, a few sentences of the story are read out loud, with each word being highlighted as it is read.
