Spe-Ler: Serious gaming for youngsters with intellectual disabilities

Abstract

When working with youngsters with intellectual disabilities, it is often a challenge to teach them 'boring' content (e.g. the 'rules of daily living' in their school or care-center). In this paper we propose a serious gaming approach in order to facilitate the learning process. The novelty in our concept is that we decouple the game and the didactical content, which allows us to transfer the learning to the youngster's leisure time. In our research, we built a framework containing several (fun) games and an administration environment that facilitates the creation of learning content. In a user experiment, measuring the user's joy and motivationwe found that the subjects enjoyed playing the games and were very attentive when the didactical content appeared. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.