Periodic Reporting for period 2 - EMPOWER (Design and evaluation of technological support tools to empower stakeholders in digital education)
Reporting period: 2023-10-01 to 2025-09-30
Children with neurodiverse conditions can experience difficulties with executive functions and self-regulation. Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDDs) comprise intellectual disability, communication disorders, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), motor disorders and specific learning disorders (SLD). Technological solutions that can respond to such individual needs of neurodiverse students have the potential to both improve the quality and inclusiveness of the education of these children and support teachers in carrying out their educational vocation. There are considerable challenges in deploying such a solution. From an educational perspective, it must be clearly defined how to personalise interventions and based on what data exactly. From a technological perspective, the challenge is not only to deliver the resulting educational program but also to do so accurately and to the benefit of the child. From an ethical perspective, several challenges come together in the trade-off between the potential educational benefits and the necessity to process relevant information regarding children via measurements and algorithms that shape the educational program.
The core objective of EMPOWER is to develop and deploy a unique learning platform for personalised education for children with NDDs that goes beyond current approaches and paradigms and empowers teachers to support children with NDDs in their academic learning and inclusion.
The core objective of EMPOWER is to develop and deploy a unique learning platform for personalised education for children with NDDs that goes beyond current approaches and paradigms and empowers teachers to support children with NDDs in their academic learning and inclusion.
The EMPOWER Project has involved intensive collaboration between a group of university departments specializing in education and psychology, as well as several university research centres focused on emerging technologies, a company, and a European-wide user association of individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs). This interdisciplinary work has spanned the three-year duration of the project, facilitating a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by various stakeholders in education regarding the integration and learning of students with NDDs in schools. It has paved the way for reversing inequalities from an early age, enabling each student to reach their full potential, and adhering to the principle of "no one is left behind." The project's implementation has involved an in-depth analysis of the impact of emerging technologies as drivers of change and their implications in the field of education, resulting in dozens of research outputs that document these achievements.
The members of the EMPOWER consortium have co-designed a set of serious games aimed at improving executive functions and emotional regulation strategies that are considered critical skills for the integration of neurodiverse students into educational settings. Those games have been implemented and fine-tuned through a set of 5 iteration cycles where incremental prototypes have been created, tested, and adjusted. The implementation has been carried out by the technological partners of EMPOWER in close collaboration with the partners from Psychology and Education, and with intensive feedback from a neurodiverse panel. An ethical framework was created and applied to all the project tasks. Initial iteration cycles included the implementation of pilot studies in Portugal and Romania with 72 students initially with a subset of games and finally with all the games, concluding with a randomised clinical trial with 87 students in the final stage of the project. The implementation of EMPOWER has produced an advancement in the integration of children with NDDs, providing teachers with an in-depth understanding of the relevant skills, the way to assess and train those skills with the support of emerging technologies.
The training materials created have been proven useful for teachers to understand the underlying mechanisms of executive functions and emotion regulation strategies. As it was originally planned, all the games developed contain several difficulty levels and take place in the context/scenario of an eco-farm. The Executive Functions games (for sustained attention, working memory, cognitive flexibility, delayed gratification, and inhibitory control) were developed as originally planned, in five separate serious games. The games for emotional regulation have been integrated into a single EmotiFest game, where all the different games are combined to improve student engagement. All the relevant emerging technologies (wearables, eye-tracking, machine-learning, gamification, and VR) have been integrated into a single platform that can run in a standalone version or connected to a remote server. All the devices used (computer, tablet with teacher app, smartwatch, and eye-tracker) are interconnected and record time-stamped data, both for assessing game performance and research purposes.
The training materials created have been proven useful for teachers to understand the underlying mechanisms of executive functions and emotion regulation strategies. As it was originally planned, all the games developed contain several difficulty levels and take place in the context/scenario of an eco-farm. The Executive Functions games (for sustained attention, working memory, cognitive flexibility, delayed gratification, and inhibitory control) were developed as originally planned, in five separate serious games. The games for emotional regulation have been integrated into a single EmotiFest game, where all the different games are combined to improve student engagement. All the relevant emerging technologies (wearables, eye-tracking, machine-learning, gamification, and VR) have been integrated into a single platform that can run in a standalone version or connected to a remote server. All the devices used (computer, tablet with teacher app, smartwatch, and eye-tracker) are interconnected and record time-stamped data, both for assessing game performance and research purposes.