by the Cookie Cloud Team

A Scientifically Validated App to Help Children to Overcome Dyslexia

in Spanish

Dyslexia• Dyslexia is a learning disability characterized by

difficulties with accurate word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities

!

• As side effect, this impedes the growth of vocabulary and background knowledge

• Children with dyslexia tend to show signs of depression and low self-esteem

(Vellutino et al., 2004)

(International Association of Dyslexia, 2011)

Dyslexia

(Jiménez et al. 2009)

(Paulesu et al. 2001)

(Eurostat, 2012)

(Interagency Commission on

Learning Disabilities,

1987)

• Neurological origin !

• 7.5-11% Spanish speaking • 50 million in the European

Union • 10-17.5% of the US population

• Frequent

• Universal

(Shaywitz, 2008)

Dyslexia and Education• Today, the most frequent way to detect

a child with dyslexia is due to her or his academic failure

• In Europe 15.2% of the students do not finish the obligatory secondary school

• In Spain 31% of the students drop secondary school

• In Spain 4 out of 6 cases of academic failure are related to dyslexia

(International Dyslexia

Association, 2011)

!

(European Commission, 2011)

!

(Eurostat, 2011)

!

(Federación Española de la Dislexia, 2008)

Traditional Methods for Overcoming Dyslexia

• To mitigate dyslexia, children need to do language exercises

• Paper based

• Monotonous exercises

• Dyslexia workbooks are boring for children

The Idea

• Provide children an interactive and engaging tool

• Overcome difficulties while playing exercises created with a new linguistic based methodology

since March 2011

Luz Rello

Linguist, PhD student on dyslexia

Clara Bayarri

Software Engineer

Content Design

& Evaluation

Development

Graphic Design

The Team

Azuki Gorriz

Graphic Designer and Illustrator

Features• Exercises in Spanish and English

• More than 5,000 different exercises

• Six types of exercises

• Five difficulty levels: initial, easy, medium, hard and expert

• Graphics showing the learning evolution

• Engaging elements: points, sounds and accessories to customize your penguin (app’s pet)

New Methodology

Scientific Content Design

(Rello,Baeza-Yates, Saggion & Pedler, LREC 2012)

(Rello, & Llisterri, LDW 2012)

(Rello, Bayarri & Gorriz, ASSETS 2012)

• Creation of a corpus of texts written by children with dyslexia

• Linguistic analysis of the errors

• Integration of the linguistic patterns in the exercises

Exercise Design

• Phonology • Orthography • Morphology • Lexicon

Empirical Error Analysis + Difficulties

• Omission

!

!

• Substitution

• Insertion

• Derivation • Word Separation

• Transposition

Difficulty Levels• Defined by:

• Specific difficulties of Dyslexia

• User testing (15 participants) (Rello, Bayarri & Gorriz, ASSETS 2013)

• Word length

• Frequency

• Number of neighbors

Text Appearance

• Based on previous research on people with dyslexia using eye-tracking

(Rello, Kanvinde & Baeza-Yates, W4A 2012)

(Rello & Baeza-Yates, ASSETS 2013)

• Best fonts for dyslexia

!

!

• Good colors for dyslexia

Engaging Children• The penguin grows and earns prizes

(Rello, Bayarri, & Gorriz, TISE 2013)

For Parents & Teachers• Graphics showing the evolution of the child

(Rello, Bayarri, & Gorriz, TISE 2013)

Scientific Evaluation• Longitudinal study in Lestonnac School,

with psychologists from Creix Centre

• 8 weeks (April-June 2013)

!

• 48 participants with dyslexia

• From 6 to 11 years old

[Rello et al., ASSETS

2014]

MethodologyDesign within-subjects

Independent measuresPiruletras

Word Search

Dependent measures

Writing — Rate of Words with ErrorsWriting — Rate of Errors per Word Writing — Rate of Errors per Wrong Word Reading — Rate of Errors per Word Subjective Reading and Writing Skills

Procedure It is a contest!

MaterialsTALE tests !Reading and Writing Tests

- Test Structure - Word Content (children’s school textbooks, app words) - Age Groups

[Rello et al., ASSETS

2014]

Methodology• Participants

- 54 potential participants - ‘Test of Reading and Writing Analysis‘ (TALE) to diagnose dyslexia - 48 participants (29 girls and 19 boys) - All experienced in playing computer games - 44 of them regularly played games on mobile devices

Two Groups

using TALE Older children:

16 girls and 8 boys 9 to 11 years oldfourth and fifth year (µ= 9.92, s = 0.78)

Younger children: 13 girls and 11 boys 6 to 9 years old first, second and third year (µ =̄ 7.67, s = 1.00)

[Rello et al., ASSETS

2014]

Results

Older Group

Younger Group

[Rello et al., ASSETS

2014]

Conclusions• It significantly improves the

writing of children with dyslexia (9 and 11 years old after 4 weeks)

• 42% less writing errors

• 34% less errors rate per wrong word

hace = 0 error ace = 1 error aze = 2 errors

[Rello et al., ASSETS

2014]

Social Impact• 17,000 downloads

(Since June 2012)

• More than 70 countries

• Since September 2013: — 2,282 downloads — 310 sold (0.79€)

Social Impact• In the curriculum of specialized centers in Barcelona and Balearic

Islands: Creix, UDITTA, Coddia, among others

• Recommended by associations of dyslexia (Madrid, Barcelona, Balearic Islands, Galicia, SUMDIS, ForDyslexia, among others)

• On TV, radio and newspapers, blogs & talks

Championship!• First Dyseggxia contest for children

at Mobile World Centre, Barcelona

• Overcome dyslexia & make friends

• Sponsors

• Organizers

1st prize

First Prize in Education Category

• over 200 apps (4 categories)

Ongoing Work• Android and Web version

• Inclusion in schools

• Inclusion reeducation programs

• Extend to more languages

• Include a business manager in our team

• Include a customer service representative in our team

• Find funding to become a start-up

• Android beta version

• Ajuntament de Barcelona (licenses and instruction classes in schools)

• — German with Hochschule Emden/Leer — Catalan with Calatan Dyslexia Association

Other Possibilities of Dyseggxia

• We discovered that some people is using it to...

!

!

!

!

• We can create books for children and school materials

• Learning new languages

• Practice spelling

• Mind training for children, adults and elderly

• Learning spelling for low-literate adults

Summary• Fosters equal opportunities

• Improves the outcome

• Empowers teachers and parents

• Scientifically validated

• Learning while playing, engaging

• More affordable (and complementary) compared to reeducation classes with a private teacher (0.79€ vs 30€/h)

Research Papers• Rello, Luz; Bayarri, Clara; Otal, Yolanda & Pielot, Martin. A Method to Improve the Spelling of

Children with Dyslexia. ASSETS 2014: The 16th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference of Computers and Accessibility, Rochester, NY USA, 20-22 October..

• Rello, Luz; Bayarri, Clara & Gorriz, Azuki. 2012. What is Wrong with this Word? Dyseggxia: a Game for Children with Dyslexia. In Proceedings of the 14th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference of Computers and Accessibility (ASSETSb 2012). Boulder, USA, 22-24 October.

• Rello, Luz; Clara Bayarri & Azuki Gorriz. 2013. Un juego educativo para niños con dislexia. XIV Congreso Internacional de Interacción Persona-Ordenador (INTERACCIÓN 2013). September 17-20, 2013, Madrid, Spain.

• Rello, Luz & Llisterri, Joaquim. 2012. There are Phonetic Patterns in Vowel Substitution Errors in Texts Written by Persons with Dyslexia. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual World Congress on Learning Disabilities (LDW 2012). Oviedo, Spain, 5-7 September.

• Rello, Luz 2013. Design of Word Exercises for Children with Dyslexia. The 5th International Conference on Software Development for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion (DSAI 2013). Vigo, Spain, 13-15 November.

Research Papers• Rello, Luz; Clara Bayarri & Azuki Gorriz. 2013. Dyseggxia o Piruletras: Ejercicios Lingüísticos

para la Reeducación de la Dislexia en un Juego para Tableta (Dyseggxia or Piruletras: Language Exercises for Rehabilitation of Dyslexia in a Game for Tablet) In Proceedings of the TISE 2013: XVIII Congreso Internacional de Informática Educativa. Porto Alegre, Brasil, 9-11 December, 2013.

• Rello, Luz; Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Horacio Saggion & Jennifer Pedler. 2012. A First Approach to the Creation of a Spanish Corpus of Dyslexic Texts. In Proceedings of the LREC Workshop Natural Language Processing for Improving Textual Accessibility (NLP4ITA). Istanbul, Turkey, 27 May, 2012.

• Rello, Luz; Kanvinde, Gaurang & Baeza-Yates, Ricardo. 2012. Layout Guidelines for Web Text and a Web Service to Improve Accessibility for Dyslexics. In Proceedings of the International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A 2012). Lyon, France, 16-17 April.

• Rello, Luz & Baeza-Yates, Ricardo. 2013. Good Fonts for Dyslexia. ASSETS 2013: The 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference of Computers and Accessibility (ASSETSa 2013), Bellevue, Washington USA, 22-24 October.

Thank You!

www.dyseggxia.com

Contact: luzrello@acm.org