Educational reading for youths with special needs

Abstract: Children with intellectual disabilities often struggle with reading, and traditional ways of learning can be frustrating and difficult. This thesis investigates the ability to adapt gaming as a more creative and engaging way for these children to practice sentence structure and reading comprehension. The result is a prototype that makes use of reading scenes mixed with interactive scenes where the user gets to build sentences through different game mechanics such as drag & drop, marking of words and point & click. Depending on what sentence is built, the story changes. The overall evaluation feedback of this prototype is positive and that it has potential but would require further work since reading is a complex activity and the reading levels of children with special needs are very individual.