Proposal of an educational game for improvement of cognitive performance of intellectually disabled people

Abstract

Intellectually disabled students have difficulty in tasks that require attention, memorization and comprehension of concepts. Assistive technologies in education, e.g. games, allow the creation of new effective alternatives for helping the learning. The main objective of this work is to evaluate the potential of an educational memory game as an assistive technology for students with intellectual disability. It was developed a game composed by a computer and a wood box in trapezoidal shape with four pushbuttons with different colors. It is presented to the volunteer, a sequence of colored images that can be yellow, blue, green or red. After the presentation, the participant should select the pushbutton with the corresponding color to the sequence presented, and the selection is presented on the screen. If the player selects correctly, it will be showed a motivational message. If the sequence is wrong, it will be showed an activity to be done by the participants. It has been done a preliminary test, to evaluate the performance of intellectually disabled students and it was possible to observe a reduction of errors along the sessions. Thus, the proposed memory game can be used as a potential assistive technology in education of intellectually disabled students.