CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Tangible interaction has drawn the attention of researchers and educators due to its possibilities for the educational scenario, acting as a bridge between the physical and digital worlds. Some research projects have found opportunities in tangible interaction for working with children with special needs in relation to their social development and communication. The applications developed for these students usually have a specific purpose and are created ad-hoc for each target group. Educators, therapists and other companion and training professionals working with these children have little to oftentimes no possibilities to design their own educational activities based on tangible interaction. In this article, we present research work that has been ongoing for several years now, and through which the tool ACoTI (Augmentative Communication through Tangible Interaction) has been developed. This application consists in a set of games focused on helping people with complex communication needs and users of augmentative communication in their language development process. The application has been evaluated by experts in the area of special education, and it has been tested with children attending a special education school. The results obtained with both the evaluation and the research project have allowed on the one hand, corroborating the usefulness of this type of applications for people with complex communication needs, and, on the other hand, understanding the need for an authoring tool that will allow creating educational activities based on tangible interaction. In this regard, a preliminary version of the requirements for such a tool has also been produced. We present here both a description of ACoTI, as well as its evaluation process and the results obtained, which have led to the creation of an authoring tool that addresses the needs expressed by the experts that participated in the evaluation process.

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