3rd Global Conference
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Friday 9th February - Sunday 11th February
2007
Sydney, Australia
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 9: Creative Engagement as a Source
of Empowerment
Chair: Alan Tapper
Art Making Process as Communicative Activity for Dysphasic Children
Eija
Riitta Parkkinen
The University of Art and Design,
Helsinki, Finland
Artistic activity by drawing and painting could be
a nice way to produce own pictures for every child, but in my research
the focus is on dysphasic children. Art can be mystified as something
very big and belonging to great adult artists. I want to speak loud
that art making process has its’ place as a communicate moment
for a child’s need
to be understood and to belong to the group other people. A child might
not choose the situation where the communication is possible to open
up, but the adults around have tools and capacity to this.
Dysphasia is a learning disability with focus on language skills; neurological
difficulty in learning to speak mother tongue and to write it correctly.
This kind of learning disabilities might in every day life be seen
as ignorance to other person’s talking and as a difficulty to
follow orders. The child can not take information normally by hearing
things. Dysphasia diagnosis excludes physiological hearing problems.
Dysphasic child has intelligence, but has no capability to communicate
easily with other people around. There is still an exception, which
is visual learning. Dysphasic children have often highly developed
understanding for visual information.
Visual information as a key to
open up own produce of pictures.
Making drawings and paintings could
probably be developable way in own communication for dysphasic children.
It has largely been seen that making pictures has not harmed people,
whose communication with other people has been stacked up. If there
is no harm of having artistic activity, so there must be results to
be seen. They must show what kind of specific use artistic working
process is capable to give for dysphasic children. I assume that there
is also difference in what way the art making process is put together
as a planned project; with creative openness and a possibility for
joy and pleasure.
Autistic Children at Play: Injecting
Fun into Research and Clinical Paradigms
Lorenzo
Vigentini
Psychology - PPLS,
The University of Edinburgh,
Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
In the past two decades, McGonigle and Chalmers
developed paradigms to explore the cognitive abilities of both human
and non-human subjects. With a developmental and evolutionary stance,
they contributed to evolve natural learning models from classic piagetian
tests of simple cognitive skills -like seriation, categorization and
transitive inference- into a wider framework of understanding, which
can be used as a window on executive functioning (McGonigle and Chalmers
2003), the foundation for language acquisition (McGonigle and Chalmers
2002, Tecumseh & al
2004) and a test for degenerative diseases (McGonigle and Chalmers
2001), with a variety of applications.
Using computer-based tasks with touch screen technology, they explored
core abilities of very young children, Alzheimer patients and capuchin
monkeys, opening the possibility of testing the cognitive functioning
of subjects with non-existent or minimal verbal abilities.
By fusing
psychological tasks into computer games, Vigentini and Chalmers (2002,
2003) demonstrated how the further development of this framework allowed,
for the first time, to engage children diagnosed within the autistic
spectrum disorder and put them on the same measuring scale. Autistic
children (especially at the lower end) are considered intractable and
untestable in most of the current psychological literature due to their
characteristics. The heterogeneity of this group makes them also a
special group of users, which poses intrinsic challenges for testing
the usability of the software.
Neverthless, using games with a strong
underlying psychological theory provided the opportunity to gain access
to performance measures of these children, earn new psychological evidence
about their cognitive functioning, which was not previously available,
and to re-evaluate computer games not only as fun, but also as an alternative,
useful tool for research with children and clinical groups.
This research
presents some performance data and contrast results from two games
developed. It also addresses important problems of assessment of usability
-beyond performance measures and engagement- and raises some interesting
questions, as well as some solutions, on how to deal with the evaluation
of computer games in this context.
