Tangible Reading Systems for Children With or At-risk for Dyslexia

Funded by GRAND NCE, McDonnell Foundation and SSHRC

New technologies, such as tangibles and touch tablets with haptic feedback, may provide solutions for helping dyslexic children learn to read. Tangible letters that can be encoded with graphical or haptic information may enable dyslexic children to better decode them. For example, color coding, used by syntheses, may enable reliable 2D decoding. Haptic feedback can be used to encode letters with signature movements. In this project we are exploring these strategies and others. The main research outcome is to determine if any of these strategies improve reading outcomes for dyslexic children.

Papers

• Fan, M., Antle, A.N., Hoskyn, M., Neustaedter, C. and Cramer, E.S. (2017) Why tangibility matters: A design case study of at-risk children learning to read and spell. In Proceedings of Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17), ACM Press (Denver, CO, USA, May 6-11), 1805-1816. [Honorable Mention Award, top 5%]
• Fan, M., Antle, A.N. & Cramer, E.S. (2016) Design rationale: Opportunities and recommendations for tangible reading systems for children, In Proceedings of Conference on Interaction Design for Children (IDC '16), ACM Press (Manchester, UK, June 21-24), 101-112.
• Cramer, E.S., Antle, A.N., Fan, M. (2016) The code of many colours: Evaluating the effects of a dynamic colour-coding scheme on children's spelling in a tangible software system. In Proceedings of Conference on Interaction Design for Children (IDC '16), ACM Press (Manchester, UK, June 21-24), 473-485.
• Fan, M., Antle, A.N. & Cramer, E.S . (2016) Exploring the Design Space of Tangible Systems Supported for Early Reading Acquisition in Children with Dyslexia. In Proceedings of Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI '16), ACM Press (Eindhoven, Netherlands, February 14-17), 689-692.
• Antle, A.N., Fan, M., and Cramer, E.S. (2015) PhonoBlocks: A Tangible System for Supporting Dyslexic Children Learning to Read. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI '15), ACM Press (Stanford, California, USA ,January 15-19), 533-538.
• Cramer, E. S. (2015). A Code of Many Colours: A Rationale, Validation and Requirements for a Sound-Based Letter Colour-Code that Might Support Some Children with Dyslexia in Spelling Certain Words(Master's Thesis, Simon Fraser University, Surrey, Canada).

Video

PhonoBlocks

Team

Dr. Alissa N. Antle: Project Lead

Dr. Maureen Hoskyn: Director, Centre for Research on Early Child Health and Education, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University.

Dra. Alyssa Wise: Associate Professor of Learning Sciences and Educational Technology, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University.

Graduate Students

• Min Fan, Post-Doctoral Fellow
• Shubhra Sarker, MSc. Student
• Emily Cramer, Ph.D. Student
• Ying Deng, MSc. Graduate