Rafigh: a living media interface for learning games

Abstract

Digital games can engage children in therapeutic and learning activities. Incorporating living media in these games can create feelings of empathy and caring in users and add more motivation and involvement to the gameplay. We present, Rafigh, a living media interface designed to motivate children to play learning games that involve repetitive and sometimes boring tasks. In the current implementation the interface is used for speech intervention games. During gameplay, children practice their speech and care for a living mushroom colony in the process. The mushroom's growth is used to communicate how much speech is used, as an indicator of degree of speech practice, during interaction.