Assistive Courseware for Dyslexic Children To Increase Learning Abilities Based on Kinect Technology (ABCDyslexic)

• Main Author: Muhammad Shafiq Bin Shahat @ Sehat, Muhammad Shafiq
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS 2012
• Subjects: T Technology (General)
• Online Access: http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/3917/1/12761_Muhammad_Shafiq_bin_Shahat%40Sehat_Dissertation_7603.pdf; http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/3917/

It is well known that every child whether it be in pre-school or primary school have the difficulties to start to learn about language. They do not recognize the alphabet thus making them to read or write even a word is hard enough. Teachers will teach them and assist them in this situation and usually those children will passed from this stage after some time. But there’s a medical conditions where some children have the difficulties to even recognize the shape of the alphabet and effecting in further progress of the studies about language. Those children faced a language-based learning disorder that interferes with the acquisition of print literacy which refers to reading, writing, and spelling. This learning disorder called as Dyslexia which refers to difficulties in reading, writing, and spelling. There is a lot of technique that created special to assists dyslexic children that mainly based on multisensory approach. It optimizes the usage of all sensory organ of a student in learning process. Previous method may not be fully utilized because of the limitation of the apparatus that needed in optimizing the use of sensory organ. So the proposed system is a courseware based on Kinect to help dyslexic to improve learning abilities was presented. The propose system will help dyslexic children to improve their learning abilities by using Kinect that will maximize the use of all sensory organ and based on the English syllabus for primary school in Standard 1 and Standard 2, that officially prepared by the Ministry of Education. The objective of this study is to identify and limitations of the current ways of teaching English to dyslexic pre-school children. Extend its purpose to the investigation of the use of gesture-based learning approach for teaching & learning to dyslexic pre-school children. Then, it purpose also to develop a courseware that based on Kinect and also to conduct user’s perception study towards the develop course. It focuses on dyslexic children at the age of 5-10 years old. During the development process, the incremental and Iterative methodology is chosen. All the analysis, design, and implementation phases performed at the same time thus producing a prototype on each phase. The cycle repeated continually until the final prototype successfully meets the requirements. At first the system should be develop using Microsoft Visual Studio C# and Kinect SDK, but after a few prototyping process, the system has been changed and develop using Adobe Flash. The Kinect application also unattached between the applications as it will allow user that don’t have Kinect to run the application. User may use Kinect or Mouse as a controller for the application.Mainly the system consists of 4 main modules. Each modules dedicated to train in certain area start from Module 1 continue till Module 4. Module 1 focus on getting to know the letters and numbers. Module 2 design to train children with proper spelling. The third module focuses on the self-introduction. Then the last module is for shapes recognition which will train children to differentiate between letters and numbers. After the final prototype has been produced, the user perception study was conducted. The study results helps to support the develop application for further improvement and alteration to the application. The study was conducted on 5 primary school situated around Kluang, Johor. The final result shows good feedback on the application towards them. The application ‘ABCDyslexic’ has the abilities to help dyslexic children to improve their learning abilities thus improving their learning in other aspect. The development of this application will surely contribute to them and also at the same time provide guidance for teacher in assisting Dyslexic children in today learning environment. But further development on this application should be done to improve it even further such as making it compatible in other platform and improving the current modules to really cater and help dyslexic children to improve their learning abilities.