Designing collaborative strategies supporting literacy skills in children with cochlear implants using serious games

Abstract

Literacy is a process where children with auditory impairments face serious difficulties in acquiring oral language, due to they must learn to listen each one of the phonetic sounds that are part of one word, so that they can learn to pronounce it and write it. Collaborative Learning (CL) applied in literacy teaching may be very favorable for children’s learning. Therefore, a model is proposed to design collaborative strategies using serious games. The model is applied to a case study that was carried out with a group of 14 children with cochlear implants, in the pre-kinder and transition stages at Institute of Blind and Deaf Children of Cauca Valley (INCSVC), in Cali, Colombia, where a collaborative serious game called Phonomagic (Fono-Mágica in spanish) was designed using a learning method called invariant method, which teachers use in the process of literacy learning to children with cochlear implant. FonoMagic is a serious game, which is formed by a physical board and a digital application, that allow children to interact with the application through activities such as completing words, recognizing sounds or identifying vowels and consonants.