When I found out that my PPAT project would involve dyslexia, it gave me quite the throwback. In my senior year of high school, I was a research intern under an enabling technology professor at a local university, and my project dealt specifically with dyslexia.
During my high school internship, I read scientific literature about dyslexia and literacy. Dyslexic children’s struggle with literacy can affect their ability to learn, as most classrooms use extensive amounts of text. Literacy is affected by phonological and morphological awareness–basically, ability to break down words into syllables and meaningful parts. Dyslexic children test below average for both abilities, so most strategies for improving literacy in dyslexic children involve training phonological and morphological awareness.
In my research, I also found that educational video games could be used to improve literacy in dyslexic children. There have been studies that have found that educational video games can be especially effective in dyslexic children, perhaps because video games access areas of the brain not limited to short-term memory, which can be impaired in dyslexic children.
The results of my research led me to create a browser-based video game to train phonological and morphological awareness abilities, Word Blaster. A video of an example of the game being played to train phonological awareness, by visualizing the syllable breakdown of a word, can be seen below:
Word Blaster was one of the highlights of my senior year, and it feels like things have come full circle now that, four years later, I’m a senior again, doing another assistive technology project targeting dyslexia. I’m looking forward to this semester!
If you’d like to try playing the game, here’s a link:
http://majin.mit.edu/wordblaster/
If you’re interested in reading the full paper about the game/research, you can read it here:
Word Blaster Research Paper