Designing a game generator as an educational technology for the deaf learners

Abstract

Children today grow up in an exciting and changing world where the web technology, Internet, mobile phones, video games and computers surround all aspects of their daily lives. These digital technologies, in particular video games, have provided new opportunities for these kids to play, communicate with others, foster their imagination and also enhance their educational performance. Unfortunately, this can be a little more different for deaf and hard of hearing children, whose native language is Sign Language (SL). The most existing video games are not geared to the unique need of these hearing disabled: there have been, even timidly, few attempts that focusing on the development of accessible educational games that could meet the requirements necessary for deaf gamers and improve their educational potential. In this context, we present in this paper a design for an interactive game generator of an accessible and effective educational game target towards the deaf and hard of hearing children. The game is called MemoSign, it federates the use of the famous memory game and a 3D signing avatar to support learning the SL notation system SignWriting. The main goal of designing such game generator is to help teachers, even parents, to create many instances of MemoSign, in few steps without any programming language knowledge, with a view to foster and promote the vocabulary acquisition for deaf learners in both signed and spoken languages.