Learning in Virtual Worlds: A New Path for Supporting Cognitive Impaired Children

We have adopted the serious game perspective to design, develop, and test a prototypal application, in a virtual world, aimed at teaching children affected by Down Syndrome how to read a clock. The main idea has been to offer them a new and intriguing learning environment to reduce the sense of frustration they often are burdened with during educational activities. In particular, an approach based on serious gaming has been coupled with the Feuerstein's method, which is currently spreading as an effective support to teaching activities aimed at impaired kids. The prototype has been developed adopting a play-centric process and has been tested with a group of children who were unable to read the time.