Dyseggxia Competition, the first linguistic game to kids who have dyslexia
Dyseggxia Competition, the first linguistic game to kids who have dyslexia
The main objective of this game competition is let society know about the condition which affects the reading ability of more than 10% of the national population. The game about Dyseggxia was originated with the idea to give this condition a better social visibility. Directed to kids between 8 and 12 years old, in order to sign up and know in which game level are going to participate, they should present their dyslexia diagnosis and go with an adult during the whole act.
Alhough Dyseggxia has been already developed in English and a new Catalan version is also being prepared, the competition will be performed in Spanish.
Besides UPF, several other entities, the digital platform Cookie Cloud, the children development centre "Creix "and the MobileWorld Capital Foundation participate in the preparation of this event.
Regarding the MobileWorld Capital Foundation, this workshop is one of the activities organized by the competence centre m4all or "mobilitat per a tots" with the objective to promote the creation of tools and solutions which might improve our quality of life. The idea is to make the mobile technology available for the whole population regardless the socio-economic context, age or the potential existence of disabilities.
On one hand, Dyseggxia is a personal project created by Luz Rello, Clara Bayarri, Informatics student at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and Azuki Gorriz, graphic designer, who are the team members of Cookie Cloud. These enterprising young women are responsible for the launching of this mobile application that allows learning by playing linguistic games. These games are specially designed and directed to kids who have to overcome their writing or reading issues.
Luz Rello has repeatedly maintained in public that the goal of her research is avoid the history that she previously lived as a child. In order to overcome her own dyslexia, she performed lots of tedious exercises.
As a researcher she has always wanted to create new activities which help to improve friendly the reading abilities. With more than 7000 downloads, Dyseggxia will be the focus of the next game contest. This application makes the user touch the screen in order to gather letters compare word, chose terminations and so on.
On the other hand, the performance of this competition is guaranteed by the success, also in the media, of the professional career of Luz Rello who has been awarded in several national and international contests (http://www.luzrello.com/Outreach.html).
An impressive career
Luz Rello completed her Linguistics degree at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2008), where she obtained the best degree grade. She was awarded with a fellowship from "La Caixa" to perform her master's degree on Natural Language Processing. Over her PhD she also received several grants, "Google Anita Borg Scholar" and "Santander JPI Premium Scholar", among others.
Her research about different subjects has been recognized in several science competitions, such as the VI Certamen Arquímedes de Investigación Universitaria (2007), Mavir (2010), Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards (2012), The Paciello Group Web Accessibility Challenge (2013) and more recently in the European Young Researchers Award (2013).
She is currently an invited expert in the Research and Development Working Group of the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). She has actively participated in the development of several applications that help dyslexic people and have more than 10.000 downloads in total.
The basis about this Dyseggxia contest, that it will take place at the Mobile World Centre next October the 5 th, can be consulted in the web www.dyseggxia.com/Concurso.html.
Related research news:
Dyseggxia, a mobile devices application for dyslexic kids
Google Anita Borg Memorial grant for a researcher of DTIC
Luz Rello obtains the European Young Researchers Award 2013