DISCUSSING IMPLEMENTATION CHOICES FOR SERIOUS GAMES SUPPORTING SPATIAL AND ORIENTATION SKILLS

Games are widely considered effective educational tools. They have been profitably adopted to foster the learning of a variety of educational subjects and to sustain the development of those horizontal, cross-disciplinary, non-subject-based competences that are commonly defined as key or transversal skills. Spatial Intelligence (which actually refers to a set of competences involving space awareness and self-perception in space) is included among the basic transversal skills underpinning a variety of cognitive tasks and is a prerequisite for autonomous mobility. Relevant scientific studies show that people can improve their spatial skills with appropriate training and a variety of experiments shows that both adults and children, after a short training have significantly improved their ability in this area. In this line, two games were developed with the aim of sustaining the development of spatial and orientation skills of people cognitive impairments. One game is oriented to the comprehension of the terms and the concepts of right/left, with the overall goal of helping cognitive disabled people to be able to understand and follow simple instructions while moving around town. The other one is aimed at exercising "perspective-taking" skills: the ability of identifying the position and the orientation of other people in the space and understanding that their perspective can be different from our own?. Specific choices (both technological and pedagogical) directly linked to the "special needs" of the target population have guided the implementation of the games, which, nevertheless, can also be adopted in mainstream primary education. In particular, the technological choices reflect the needs linked to each game constraints (e.g. the need for optimal 3D representation or for table touch employment) as well as general specifications emerging from users' requirements (e.g. the need for adaptive features, multiple interaction formats). Pedagogical choices, instead, are linked to the established educational objectives (e.g. the nature and level of difficulty of the tasks and their optimal sequence). They regard the definition of the most appropriate educational strategies (e.g. drill and practice vs exploratory exercises) and the suitability of the type of feedback and assessment (e.g. formative vs summative evaluation actions; in itinere vs final assessment).