Entering Aladdin's cave: Developing an app for children with Down syndrome

Abstract

Tablets have much to offer children with learning difficulties, but evidence of their effectiveness to teach academic skills is limited and cannot be easily separated from the quality of the software. This paper analyses data from 3 iterative cycles of designing an app for children with Down syndrome to support their awareness of quantity through an inclusive game. Research with neurotypical children suggests that representation of quantity (or magnitude) is an area with considerable potential in supporting the foundations for children's mathematical learning. It has received little attention as an aspect for intervention for children with Down syndrome. Data collected in this study illustrate the need to carefully align the game mechanic to the target skills, strengthen levels of access, and introduce gradations of attentional demand. They also signal the interrelationship between children's cognitive and affective responses to the game, making it essential to find the optimal level of challenge. Children's strategies in response to mistakes indicate the importance of creating an agile responsive system. The data also suggest that developers routinely extend the number of features that are optional, enabling a greater level of personalization and a more inclusive game. report the difficulty of finding age-appropriate content as early skill programs are "naïve and boring," and easily outgrown (Feng et al., 2010).Stephenson and Limbrick (2015) in a review of studies that employ touch screen mobile devices with participants with developmental disabilities conclude that there is a paucity of robust evidence of effectiveness, especially with respect to their use to teach academic skills. They further conclude that the devices provide an easily accessible tool but that different apps will "present different challenges" (p. 3789) although they do not identify what they are. This paper explores those challenges as they arose in the development of an app specifically designed to support numerical awareness through an inclusive game, one that children with DS could access and play independently.Children with DS experience particular challenges in mathematics often lacking the basic foundations on which to build (Abdelhameed, --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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