Designing effective serious games for people with intellectual disabilities

Abstract

Educating people with intellectual disabilities (ID) is a challenging process. Educators and researchers promote new methods in order to enhance the learning process and succeed in improving specific skills that people with intellectual disabilities have limitations. Serious games (SG) used in special education are considered as a successful tool for benefiting learning. In order to develop effective serious games, however, it is important to plan the design process properly. Therefore, design guidelines and principles should be thoroughly examined and accordingly selected. This paper aims to: (a) study existing serious games design frameworks; (b) extract design guidelines and principles from existing serious games for people with intellectual disabilities; (c) analyze the guidelines and principles, based on the elements of the design frameworks, which will then be used as the basis for a design framework dedicated to serious games for people with intellectual disabilities.