Includ-ed, red europea de educación inclusiva

GraphoGame is a computer game that was originally designed in Finland to help children learn letter- sound correspondences. It was developed in the interdisciplinary Agora Human Technology Center of the University of Jyväskylä in collaboration with the Niilo Mäki Institute. The University of Jyväskylä is member of the incluD-ed LPG in Jyväskylä.

The EU funded a large-scale cross-linguistic investigation of GraphoGame in Finland, Switzerland, Holland and Britain. GraphoGame technology can be applied more widely in helping children with blocks of reading skill. Several language versions of this game have been developed for research purposes in other collaboration projects. These include e.g. Nyanja and Tonga in Zambia. The main goal of new GLIDE project is to make possible reaching globally scalable and localized support service to help millions of children to read.

More information can be found from heikki.lyytinen.info, playable demos on website http://grapholearning.info/graphogame (not intended for children, as they contain only a handful of content), and some videos about Teaching literacy and Graphogame on the website http://grapholearning.info/video-materials.

 

Detailed information on GraphoGame

GraphoGame is a child-friendly computer game that helps children to learn the basic letters and their sounds. Through a series of levels, gradually, the child is able to construct these letters into small words and then larger words. Importantly, the game incorporates a dynamic element in that it also adapts to the child’s own level of ability and sets further levels in accordance with this ability. This prevents frustration in the context of learning while, at the same time, enjoyable positive feedback sustains the child’s interest in playing for sufficient time for learning to be established.

GraphoGame was developed in Finland in the interdisciplinary Agora Human Technology Center of the University of Jyväskylä in collaboration with the Niilo Mäki Institute. It is based on the scientific follow-up study of Finnish children at familial risk for dyslexia from birth to reading age which professor Heikki Lyytinen started in the early 1990´s. GraphoGame was originally designed to help children learn letter- sound correspondences, but this game has been shown to be efficient in instructing children´s literacy skills in some orthographies and similar results are foreseen in additional ones. It is expected that the same technology can be applied more widely in helping children to acquire also spoken second language skills. In some respects playing a computer game which involves sufficient repetition can be a more productive way of learning than more traditional ways.

It encourages children to learn through a computer game firstly the important grapheme-phoneme correspondences, and then moving on to larger grapheme-phoneme combinations and eventually to the words, in order to achieve a strong mechanical foundation for fluent reading and spelling skills. it has been shown that phonological awareness develops and it can be improved by training, and this in turn improves reading acquisition across languages. Computer games have been used efficiently in the past 15 years in dyslexia studies. By playing the game, children learn the most typical letter-sound relations in a synthetic-type phonics approach. Once they know the basic sounds/letters, they gradually move onto short and increasingly longer words. Learning to read with GraphoGame is so easy, that the child is able to play it alone. It is like an additional teacher who helps children to learn important letter sounds correspondences which are the building blocks of reading skill.

The pilot studies conducted in Jyväskylä indicate that computer games which are adaptive to each individual child's performance, are visually and auditorilly interesting providing opportunities to monitor the achievements and are rewarding, can be the way to introduce the training tasks to children in an effective manner. To overcome illiteracy globally, international leading experts have joined us. Now we propose to look for a sustainable way to export the already proven Finnish delivery model. The new business model is created around an Entity that is aiming to reach hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The delivery model is based both on country specific and global activities.

The main goal of the project is to design and implement an Entity, which will make possible reaching our ambitious goal: globally scalable and localized support service to help millions of children to read. The GLIDE project is funded by Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation and University of Jyväskylä.

The first English adaptation of GraphoGame was developed along the same theoretical framework used in the Finnish version. Finnish is a transparent orthography whereas English is an opaque orthography. However, while English is inconsistent at the level of single phoneme-grapheme correspondences, it is a more consistent orthography at the level of larger units, in particular the rime.

Globally, 744 million illiterate individuals over 15 years of age and millions of children urgently need help in learning to read due to learning disorders and other challenges. Several language versions of GraphoGame have been developed for research purposes in other collaboration projects. These include e.g. Nyanja and Tonga in Zambia. The project goal was to employ new media formats and pilot models for providing easily accessible reading materials in local languages in Zambia with special focus on new technology and mobile learning. The project provided promising results supporting the scientific goals of GraphoGame by preparing the necessary additional steps needed for learning functional reading skills by creating exciting reading material for children in low-income countries in their own language.