| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 創意產業設計研究所 === 101 === Children suffering from cerebral palsy often show difficulties in mathematics compared to their typically developing peers. Assistive technology provides cerebral palsy children receiving special education with significant physical and psychological improvement by helping them communicate and express themselves and also by enhancing their social and life skills. This study explores the needs, requirements and problem areas behind their mathematics learning with the aim to develop a set of guidelines to design assistive mathematics learning aids for them.
These children suffer from gross and fine motor skill disorders, cognitive dysfunction, and uncontrolled and uncoordinated movements. Their cognitive difficulties, in addition to their motor skill impairments, cause hindrance in their finger-counting strategies, which strongly affects their number counting and basic arithmetic problem solving abilities. It was found that a number of assistive devices are widely used to support computing, organizing, aligning of math problems or provide visual or audio support, but the area of learning how to solve simple problems by counting numbers, i.e. basic finger-counting practices has not received much attention.
Four children with a formal diagnosis of spastic athetoid cerebral palsy, studying in Junior Academics Section at Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy, Kolkata, India participated in the study. Their mathematics learning behaviour, strengths, weaknesses, motor abilities and cognitive abilities were studied. In agreement with previous studies, the results showed that the inability to use finger-counting practices indeed affects the children’s problem solving skills.
Furthermore, it was found that assistive devices enable these children to work around their difficulties by banking on their strengths. Therefore, to meet their needs with basic problem solving abilities, the idea was to help them circumvent the actual physical task of counting fingers to solve simple addition and subtraction problems. The proposed guidelines focus on how their most common strengths (e.g. pressing buttons, pushing or hitting objects, pointing at objects) can be used to enhance or support their sense of appreciation of increase or decrease in quantity corresponding to a repetitive action in order to substitute for finger-counting and assist their arithmetic problem solving.
A mathematics educational app and three activity games were developed based on these guidelines, and one of the games was tested with the participants. To conclude, these guidelines can be beneficial for designing assistive learning aids that would enable cerebral palsy children to learn counting by using their most common abilities and thus make learning an easier and enjoyable experience for them.
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