Tangible Serious Games with Real Objects to Support Therapies for Children with Special Needs

After several months of therapeutic work on Mateo, a child with special needs, the therapist of the Child Development and Early Intervention Centre (CDIAT) observed with astonishment how the child correctly associated the fruits with the corresponding pictograms. That was after only a few sessions using the Interactive Fruit Panel presented in this article. The interactive application described in this paper is a way to digitize one of the games commonly used by CDIAT therapists to help children to associate real objects (fruits in this case) with their graphical representation (pictogram) in a therapeutic activity using real objects as the interactive basis. This article summarizes the description of the proposed system, as well as the results obtained from a pilot test with real participants in collaboration with professionals from CDIAT. The preliminary results show how children with special needs achieved learning goals faster with the interactive panel, and how the children's attention improved.