Project description
A game to detect developmental dyscalculia
Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a common learning disability that affects personal and professional growth throughout life. Children with DD often struggle to link numbers with spatial awareness. Early diagnosis and intervention can help individuals with DD lead independent, productive lives. The ERC-funded TaGaDeDys project aims to develop a tablet-based gaming tool for the early detection and treatment of DD. This interactive environment will assess and stimulate children’s space-number association through game-like tasks and general math assessments. Connected to an online algorithm, it will analyse children’s performance over time, serving as an initial screening method for those at high risk for DD and enabling quick, accessible testing of number processing skills.
Objective
The ultimate goal of the project is to provide a screening and rehabilitation method for the early detection and treatment of developmental dyscalculia (DD), in the form of an entertaining, tablet-based gaming environment. DD is a common learning disability and severely impacts personal and professional development throughout the lifespan. Early diagnosis and interventions increase the possibilities for people with DD to live an independent and productive life. Children with DD have difficulties to map numbers representation into space (in contrast, typically developing children understanding of numerical concepts is facilitated by spatial mapping of numbers). We want to develop a tool which will use a gaming environment to evaluate and stimulate Space Number Association (SNA) in children. Kids will be stimulated with game-like SNA tasks and monitored with more general mathematical skills tasks. We will link the device with an online algorithm for on-line extraction of the responses that can compute and analyse each kids performance to track it as it changes over time.
This project builds on two behavioural tasks I have established to implicitly assess SNA in children and infants. These paradigms can become a first-stage screening tool for individuals at high-risk for DD. We will further advance this method into a tool that allows easy, rapid and automatic testing of space-to-number processing in young children from any cultural and educational background, and in any context. The paradigms will be embedded in a gaming environment which is optimally engaging for the young users, facilitating the spontaneous participation in foundational numerical training targeted to the needs and specific numerical competences of each child. Moreover, we will further validate relationship between SNA and core numerical competence development, providing initial crucial steps for empirical validation of our method as an early screening tool for DD.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC-POC - HORIZON ERC Proof of Concept GrantsHost institution
38122 Trento
Italy