• I realized how parents’ and teachers’ attitude towards a child’s academic struggles directly affects the child’s self esteem and motivation to study.
• Most struggling students are filtered out as “too distracted”, “doesn’t try hard enough” and “is ill-mannered”.
• Parents, especially in low-literacy areas, get offended when informed of the possibility of their child having different needs.

I visualized insights I had gained from user research

• The answer options will dynamically change depending upon the child’s level and performance in previous questions. For example, for a higher level, the options that appear can be similar in shape or sound to the correct option - hence, making it harder for the child.
• When the child incorrectly attempts a question, they will be scaffolded towards the correct answer via appropriate hints depending upon the incorrect selection.

Demonstration: Scaffolding the child towards the right answer after an incorrect attempt

By employing Orton Gillingham principles, the game will include multisensory activities which involves children using a touch interface (smartphones or tablets) to look at the letters and trace them as their sound is simultaneously produced while prompting the child to say it out loud.

Demonstration: Multisensory - the letter is displayed (sight) and its audio is played (voice) while the child traces the letter (touch) and is prompted to say its name out loud (speech)

• By designing an engaging 2D game with gamification features: coins gained, character animation, mini adventure games.
• By keeping activities bite-sized and focused on specific learning outcomes.

Demonstration: Use of gamification elements: companion, adventure game, coins etc.

I created lists of Urdu words and letters which are known to cause confusion, which would later be used in increasing the difficulty of some activities. These lists included:

• Letters that sound similar
• Letters that look similar
• Homophones (words that sound the same)
• Homographs (words that are spelt the same way)

I designed a total of 10 lessons which target common skills individuals with Dyslexia struggle with:

• Phonics
• Phonemic Awareness
• Phonological Awareness
• Spelling
• Reading
• Comprehension
• Fluency
• Vocabulary

Selective lesson cards displaying (a) learning objectives, (b) activities within each lesson, (c) target skills

Activities within each lesson were divided according to:

• Increasing level of difficulty by:
• Increasing the number of letters in the words presented
• Introducing “tricky words” i.e. homographs or homophones
• Different modality of questions - i.e. text, image, audio

Demonstration: Use of 2 types of modality to reinforce learning: (a) text, (b) images

I acknowledged that the dashboard served a significant part of a Dyslexic child’s journey to learn a language, hence I challenged myself to design a dashboard that not only displays results but also provides guardians with insights. I focused on 3 sections:

• Progress: displaying overall progress of the child in terms of the number of letters, words, sentences and skills learnt
• Performance: a list of words and sentences the child has mastered and the ones they need more practice in
• A Deeper Analysis: a deep dive into each activity’s performance which displays a printable list of words and sentences the child attempted correctly and incorrectly

Demonstration: Dashboard screens

Not only does this microscopic monitoring aim to be extremely beneficial for psychologists and teachers, it can also be useful in identifying patterns of mistakes children with Dyslexia make in Urdu, a research avenue explored for the first time.

I have intentionally omitted confidential information here.

• Lessons gradually move from sounds - letters - smaller words - larger words - sentences.
• Letter groups are introduced in a pre-defined unique order*.
• New words are introduced consisting of only letters which are previously known for a particular letter group.

*Instead of introducing the Urdu alphabet in the correct order, I decided to follow a sequence of introducing Urdu letters, as designed by a renowned Urdu language professor, in an order that highlights aspects of the Urdu script that are most likely to cause confusion in terms of appearance or sound - suitable for individuals with Dyslexia.