Children with special needs are often impaired when it comes to acquiring language. Overcoming this requires tedious repetition of language related tasks at a very early age. In order to develop a cognitive connection between language and the real world, these tasks should combine both non-physical and physical elements. Digiplay is a product currently under development that facilitates such language tasks. Unsupervised use of this product requires a method for selecting the task that a given child should be presented with, so that she is both properly challenged and additionally desires to continue playing. The prospects of this technology includes an improvement of techniques for language acquisition, the freeing up of resources in child care centres, and to do language exercises at home. In this talk I will first present and demonstrate the Digiplay product in its current form. I will then describe the techniques we have employed to make the system adapt to the child's ability, in particular our adaptation of the system used on the Dutch elementary school learning platform Rekentuin (Mathsgarden). Finally I will go into our analysis of the data gathered by the Digiplay product.

Martin Holm Jensen, DTU

NB: Please note that this Tuesday seminar begins later than usual, at 13.00, but we will keep up up our tradition with a sandwich lunch at the usual time, so feel free to join us for a sandwich from 12.30.