Play and Learning Are Closely Interrelated

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How can digital educational elements enhance the motivation of children with a hearing impairment to learn to speak? That was the topic of Architect Louise Aagaard’s Ph.D. project at the Aarhus School of Architecture in Denmark. In her Ph.D. dissertation she presents, among other things, the findings of a case study where she used an interactive floor with a group of schoolchildren to study the connection between language development and movement.

By Hans Emborg Bünemann

For humans, learning is at its most efficient under pleasant circumstances. With this insight as her point of departure, on 16 June 2010 Louise Aagaard successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation Leg og lær aktiviteter til børn med cochlear implant – undersøgt gennem computerspillet, det interaktive gulv og digitale legeobjekter (Play-and-learn activities for children with a cochlear implant – investigated through the use of the computer game, the interactive floor, and digital play objects). The topic of the dissertation was the use of digital elements in the education of children with a hearing impairment. In three case studies she examines the potential for motivating these children to use digital products aimed at facilitating their spoken language acquisition.

Making Learning Fun

In her Ph.D. project, Louise Aagaard applied the method research through design, which is characterised by the researcher’s use of the design process and its tools for research purposes.
“We know that children learn most efficiently when they are motivated to learn, and that many children really enjoy the computer as a toy. Based on this knowledge, I used design techniques – such as user involvement – in my case studies to generate new knowledge about how we can use new digital technology to motivate children with a hearing impairment to practise speaking,” Louise Aagaard explains.
In her studies she has focused in particular on so-called CI children, that is, children with a hearing impairment who are equipped with a cochlear implant (CI) at a very young age. A cochlear implant is a sophisticated hearing aid that stimulates the auditory nerve by electric means.

Interactive Floor as an Educational Device

From the designer’s toolbox Louise Aagaard drew in particular on methods for involving the users in the process. In collaboration with the Danish research centre Interactive Spaces she created a narrative framework for the participants’ involvement in workshops, for example, where they escape the limitations of everyday life and instead imagine and articulate what the world might be like.
In one of her case studies, Louise Aagaard tested an interactive floor called the Wisdom Well, where the participants use their bodies as a means of interaction. Based on a hypothesis that children improve their language skills through social and physical interactions with the environment the project group studied the connection between language development and movement.
In workshops the participants – a group of students in the school where the Wisdom Well is installed – were asked to immerse themselves in a fictional universe and solve a riddle. This technique, so-called fictional inquiry, made it possible to generate ideas for the subsequent stages in the design process, for example with regard to finding a way to integrate the whole body in classroom activities. Louise Aagaard explains:
“Research has described the multiple human intelligences, and this knowledge is applied in the educational approach to different ways of learning. In the Wisdom Well one interacts through visual, auditory, social and bodily means, and thus, multiple learning styles are engaged. With this case study I have explored the possibility of expanding the focus of speech therapy to a broader perspective than speech alone to integrate the linguistic, social and physical interaction with the environment.” 

Together with experts from the special-needs teaching aids provider Materialecentret (www.matcen.dk), Louise Aagaard has developed the computer game Trylledrikken (Magic Potion) to facilitate language acquisition in children with a hearing impairment. The game revolves around voice-based interaction in a series of scenarios, each with three levels, that can be played out individually or in a chronological sequence that makes up a coherent narrative. In the adult section, the speech therapist monitors the child’s language development. Experiments show that the combination of a narrative, auditory interaction, and immediate computer feedback enhances the children’s motivation. Photo: Louise Aagaard

Editing the Ground Rules

However, the children do not just play the game in the Wisdom Well. The game editor also attracts a great deal of attention.
“It’s highly motivating for children to use the game editor to shape the content of the game, just as it’s often more fun to build a blanket fort than to actually play in it,” says Louise Aagaard and adds,
“The Wisdom Well is one among several examples in my case studies that illustrate the potential inherent in the flexibility of the computer medium and the capacity for customising the educational approach to match the individual child’s auditory and speech development and learning style.”

Product Scenarios and Context

In her Ph.D. project, Louise Aagaard focused both on developing digital products for CI children and on the overall context, that is, the use of the products and their influence on people and the environment, for example the children’s families as well as speech therapists, psychologists and audiologists. This broad approach leads her to suggest two potential paths of development for the project in her analysis of the project findings. Both will be based on the development that has taken place in Denmark since 2005, when mandatory neonatal hearing screening of children made it possible to diagnose a hearing impairment at an early stage. Thus, it has also become possible to implant CIs while the children are quite young.
“Many of these children receive cochlear implants already at the age of one year. That lets them develop their speech capacity so quickly that they typically catch up with children with normal hearing around the age of two years. That eliminates their need to acquire sign language,” says Louise Aagaard.
She envisions a future research effort in extension of the Ph.D. project to pursue either a strategic or a product-oriented track. In anticipation of the product-oriented track the dissertation presents a number of design directions in the form of psychologically and educationally founded scenarios for the development of new products to match the needs for play and learning of CI children aged 0-3 years.

Strategic Design Approach

However, Louise Aagaard explains that the new state of affairs with early screening and treatment has given rise to new issues that call for a strategic design approach which also includes communication, education and other aspects. That would enable more radical, future-oriented solutions.
“As designers we are trained to imagine a desired future situation, envisioning something that does not yet exist,” she says. “In a strategic research project, the design researcher is part of a team that involves users, that is, parents and children, as well as experts – audiologists and speech therapists. In this interdisciplinary work, the design researcher can reconcile the different points of departure in the team by imagining and envisioning future scenarios.”

Communication and Economic Priorities

As examples, Louise Aagaard mentions the development of a strategy for continuing training for speech therapists and the need for improved communication between speech and language experts and the parents of CI children. The early introduction of CI makes speech acquisition a realistic goal for the vast majority of CI children, and in Louise Aagaard’s assessment it seems paradoxical that these children’s parents are still offered courses in sign language. She points out that in the long run, CI treatment may pose a threat to the sign language environment in Denmark. Nevertheless, Louise Aagaard argues that economic funds should be redistributed to enable a whole-hearted effort to offer formal auditory/verbal follow-up services to all CI children and their families. In relation to this effort, information is crucial.
“It’s essential that parents receive clear information that lets them feel confident in opting out of the visual approach in the form of sign language. The CI child needs to be bombarded with sound and speech. If the brain fails to receive auditory stimulation at an early stage, it reorganises its efforts away from the auditory and toward the visual,” says Louise Aagaard.

Top image: The 12-square-metre interactive floor that makes up the Wisdom Well addresses body-centred learning. Here, design research combines insights from studies of play and learning with new technology, thus creating experiments that might generate new knowledge.
Photo: Louise Aagaard