Conceptual Framework to Support a Web Authoring Tool of Educational

Games for Deaf Children

Rafael dos Passos Canteri

, Laura S

anchez Garc

ıa

, Tanya Amara Felipe

Ludmilla Fernandes Oliveira Galv

and Diego Roberto Antunes

Department of Informatics, UFPR - Federal University of Paran

a, Curitiba, Brazil

Department of Higher Education, INES - National Institute of Deaf Education, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Department of Informatics, UTFPR - Federal Technological University of Paran

a, Ponta Grossa, Brazil

Keywords:

Education Informatics, Educational Games, Video Games, Deaf Education, Authoring Tools.

Abstract:

The Deaf people constitute minority communities that, for many years, suffered with the lack of tools for

teaching and learning materials based on Sign Language - the natural language that deﬁne their social iden-

tity and culture. The Education Informatics presents great potential in development of tools for teaching

support, but have not produced effective tools for Deaf people, especially to support the learning process of

Deaf children. Educational Games have shown successful experiences when used in the learning process of

different knowledge ﬁelds and the results tend to be more relevant when such games are used with children

and teenagers. However, the development of an educational game requires several skills related to software

engineering, programming, design, illustration, pedagogy, among others. This paper presents a framework

for design of effective educational games for Deaf children based on Children Teaching Methodology and

Educational Digital Games literature. The results include: the application of the framework in creating a web

authoring tool that allows non-experts in game design, such as Deaf children teachers, to create educational

games in a simple and semi-automatic way; and an example game generated by the tool.

1 INTRODUCTION

Data from the most recent National Health Survey

(PNS) of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and

Statistics (IBGE) in 2018 show that 6.7% of the

Brazilian population have some type of disability

(IBGE, 2018). According to the latest survey, 1.1%

of the Brazilian population has a hearing impairment.

About 0.9% of Brazilians were deaf due to some situ-

ation during life and 0.2% were born deaf. Therefore,

there are over four hundred thousand Brazilians who

were born deaf.

Within this universe, there is a complicating fac-

tor: international researches show that more than

90% of children born deaf are from hearing families

(Mitchell and Karchmer, 2004) (Eleweke and Rodda,

2000). This means that these children end up not hav-

ing an effective means of communicating with their

parents, resulting in them not developing their natu-

ral form of communication (Sign Language) at home

and in the early stages of childhood. This fact occurs

because of the lack of Sign Language knowledge by

most parents, as well as society in general.

Important theorists in the ﬁeld of Education em-

phasize the importance of language acquisition for

the cognitive development of the child (Piaget, 1923)

(Vygotsky, 1964) and for acquisition of language by

Deaf Brazilian children (Karnopp, 1994) (Quadros,

1997). Thus, it is fundamental for the personal de-

velopment of the Deaf

child that he or she is taken

to places where he can learn and practice his coun-

try’s Sign Language learning such as day care center

and special school.

Taking into account, ﬁrst, the needs of the Deaf

communities for technologies that assist their educa-

tion processes, as well as the potential for the applica-

tion of digital games in education, a niche of research

is perceived. On the other hand, the development of

digital games requires advanced knowledge of pro-

gramming, graphic libraries and manipulation of user

inputs. This hinders and, in general, prevents educa-

tional games from being built by those people who

work directly with the Deaf and hold the knowledge

This convention is used to refer to Deaf communities as

linguistic minorities, not as disabled people (Felipe, 1989).

226

Canteri, R., García, L., Felipe, T., Galvão, L. and Antunes, D.

Conceptual Framework to Support a Web Authoring Tool of Educational Games for Deaf Children.

DOI: 10.5220/0007676102260235

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2019), pages 226-235

ISBN: 978-989-758-367-4

of what needs to be taught - the teachers.

In this sense, the guiding questions raised for this

research paper are:

1. How can game designers or professional game

developers build suitable educational games for

Deaf children?

2. Is it possible that teachers of Early Childhood Ed-

ucation without advanced computer skills can cre-

ate digital educational games for their Deaf stu-

dents?

Therefore, this paper presents a conceptual frame-

work for design of effective educational games for

Deaf children based on Children Teaching Method-

ologies and Educational Digital Games literature. The

results includes the application of the framework in

the development of an authoring tool allowing non-

experts in game design, such as Deaf children teach-

ers, to create educational games in a simple and semi-

automatic way. For the test and validation phase,

the paper presents the generation of a game from

the point-and-click adventure genre for Deaf children

through the use of the developed tool.

The remainder of this paper is structured as fol-

lows: Section II discusses the basic concepts that sub-

stantiate this work, such as Educational Video games

and Guidelines for Early Childhood Education. Sec-

tion III presents the core making of this work, the

proposed conceptual framework for educational game

design. Section IV shows the description and features

of the resulting web authoring tool for educational

games. Finally, Section V ends the paper with the

ﬁnal considerations about the research.

2 THEORETICAL BASES

The use of computers in education began in 1967

with Seymour Papert, the best known theorist, cre-

ator of the Logo programming language and one of

the pioneers of artiﬁcial intelligence (Papert et al.,

1980) (Balacheff, 2017). In Brazil, the use of com-

puters in education started with Valente at State Uni-

versity of Campinas - UNICAMP in 1991, through

the EDUCOM Project in Special Education, imple-

mented in ﬁve centers: UNICAMP, Federal Uni-

versity of Pernambuco - UFPE, Federal University

of Minas Gerais - UFMG, Federal University of

Rio de Janeiro - UFRJ and Federal University of

Rio Grande do Sul - UFRGS (Felipe, 1991). The

EDUCOM Project implemented at UFPE worked

with the language Logo, using a bilingual proposal:

Libras (Brazilian Sign Language) and Portuguese for

communication with Deaf participants. Since then,

the projects using computer for education have been

emerging and are increasingly consolidating as peda-

gogical proposes for education.

2.1 Educational Games

Currently many electronic games, digital games,

computer games or video games have been used for

different proposals. All of these terms are used to

identify computer programs designed to entertain and

amuse the user, while he interacts with it.

The ability of video games to engage and chal-

lenge players through ever more complex and de-

manding stages and the range of cognitive, linguistic

and sociocultural practices generated by games have

led to increased interest in the use and study of dig-

ital games in schools (Beavis et al., 2015). Video

games are no longer considered mere amusements of

children and have come to be seen as a signiﬁcant

medium of contemporary communication and expres-

sion.

Educational games are those designed to teach

while distracting. Many scholars in the areas of Edu-

cation, Cognition, and Psychology have been working

tirelessly on educational games over the years (An-

netta, 2010). Such games are developed speciﬁcally

for pedagogical purposes, usually with children as a

target audience, and topics such as Geography, Math,

Reading, among others, being taught while playing.

Examples include Oregon Trail (by Sierra On-Line),

one of the ﬁrst educational games ever, created to

teach History; Reader Rabbit (by The Learning Com-

pany), a game for teaching Reading and Spelling; and

Math Blaster (by Davidson Associates), focused on

the teaching of Arithmetic (Novak, 2011).

The Educational Game design still consists of a

difﬁcult operation, which requires a well-formed re-

lation between instructional process and game design

to be effective (Hotte et al., 2017). The literature

presents good examples of game design applied to

educational and learning games. Nevertheless, the

development and the design are complex activities

(Hotte et al., 2017), not allowing holders of knowl-

edge and specialists in teaching methodologies, such

as educators, to produce an educational game in a

simple way.

The process to develop an educational game in-

volves the collaboration of several proﬁles, such as

teachers, software developers, game designers, illus-

trators, pedagogical specialists, among others (Hotte

et al., 2017). This process is complex and makes it

difﬁcult for a person who is unfamiliar with game de-

sign to develop an effective educational game. There-

fore, this research aims to build a framework to guide

Conceptual Framework to Support a Web Authoring Tool of Educational Games for Deaf Children

227

the design of educational games for Deaf children

and presents a web authoring tool that allows non-

specialists to build games in a simple and semi-

automatic way.

Educational Games can provide an immersive en-

vironment that enables more contextual education us-

ing elements such as interactive scenarios, challenge

mechanisms, artifacts and people interactions (i.e.

collaboration), and are able to simulate real-world sit-

uations (Guigon et al., 2018).

Adaptation is a key concern for the development

of Educational Games, particularly for people with

special needs (Laforcade et al., 2018). Therefore, it

is important to have a way to allow teachers and ped-

agogues (people with no-experience in game design)

to build a game semi-automatically by adapting ele-

ments such as: learning scenarios, dynamics and el-

ements of the domain, to meet unique characteristics

of the students, like the Deaf children.

2.2 Early Childhood Education

The Early Childhood Education is the stage of Educa-

tion that aims at the Integral and Integrated Develop-

ment of the Child. That is, it involves the psycholog-

ical, sociolinguistic, physical, motor and psychomo-

tor development. Teaching Methodologies must take

into account different aspects of the target audience

to be taught, such as age, social situation and special

needs. This is extremely relevant in Early Childhood

Education, in which small differences in the age of the

students tend to lead to a completely different world

understanding and abilities.

The educational foundations of this work are the

most recent National Guidelines for Early Childhood

Education (Brasil, 2009) and the latest National Com-

mon Curricular Base (Brasil, 2017). Both of them

are normative documents, written by the Ministry of

Education (MEC) in partnership with the National

Council of Secretaries of Education (CONSED) of the

Brazilian government.

Two guiding axes of pedagogical practices form

the The National Curriculum Guidelines for Early

Childhood Education: Interaction and Play, as

shown in Figure 1.

Both constitutional axes have the potential to be

harnessed in educational computer games. Interac-

tion: Children who play the same game tend to chat

and socialize about the things they experience dur-

ing their interaction with the game. Play: The act

of playing a game, by itself, can be understood as

play, and therefore bring all the beneﬁts of the game

as a stimulus to creativity, overcoming obstacles, self-

knowledge and concentration.

Figure 1: Pedagogical Practices in Early Childhood Educa-

tion (Brasil, 2009).

Some fundamental bases constitute the National

Curriculum Guidelines for Early Childhood Edu-

cation and the National Common Curricular Base.

These bases are the Rights of Learning and the Fields

of Experiences.

The Rights of Learning presented by these docu-

ments can be understood as the capacities and compe-

tences that the children need to develop in this stage

of Education. There are six Rights of Learning in the

Early Childhood Education: Live together; Play; Par-

ticipate; Explore; Express; Know yourself. All of

them can be explored and integrated with game me-

chanics

The Fields of Experience are divided in ﬁve

groups, and they are responsible to form the curricu-

lar organization of this stage of education. The Fields

of Experience are:

• The self, the other and the we;

• Body, gestures and movement;

• Traits, sounds, colors and shapes;

• Listening, speaking, thinking and imagination;

• Spaces, times, quantities, relationships, and trans-

formations.

3 THE CONCEPTUAL

FRAMEWORK

The Conceptual Framework (CFW) intends to pro-

vide support for the development of educational digi-

tal games for Deaf children. Its target user proﬁle are

programmers and game designers who wish to build

and implement their own educational game.

The Framework’s goal is to allow the construc-

tion of educational games projects for Deaf children,

regardless of development technology, programming

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228

language, game engines, graphical resolutions, desti-

nation platforms (consoles, computers, tablets, smart-

phones...), technical conﬁgurations, and operating

systems.

With the use of the CFW, the developed educa-

tional games should have the necessary foundation in

relation to the user interface and interaction environ-

ment, the mechanics of gameplay, the methodology

of teaching and the educational content. Thus, the de-

veloper who creates his game supported by the frame-

work will have, in his software product, the presence

of features that the program needs to contain, while

still being capable of developing a unique application.

The basic inputs supporting the construction of the

conceptual framework come from the fundamentals

of the main sub-areas with which this work is related:

Electronic Games, Informatics in Education, Educa-

tional Games, Human-Computer Interaction and Deaf

Children Education.

The modularization of the CFW is inspired by

the general architecture of Intelligent Tutoring Sys-

tems (ITS), which is divided into Specialist Model,

Student Model, Domain Model and the Interface

(Nwana, 1990). Although the educational games

that one wishes to construct are not tutoring systems,

the proposed modularization is also adequate for this

purpose, since the elements present and the aspects

treated in the different ITS models are also largely

present in the process of construction and subsequent

use of educational games.

3.1 The Conceptual Framework

Modules

The support structures of the proposed CFW are four:

Gameplay and Tutoring, Teaching-Learning, Student

or Player, and Graphics and Interface. Each module

in the Conceptual Framework has a key-role in the

production of an educational game for Deaf children.

The modules have speciﬁc responsibilities regarding

the game, but all modules interact with each other,

since the features of a game, even with its peculiar-

ities, are interconnected. Figure 2 displays the four

modules and their interconnections.

The Gameplay and Tutoring Module is respon-

sible for offering the mechanics of digital games and

for interrelating them with what one wishes to teach.

In turn, the Teaching-Learning Module is the one

that encompasses the concepts and educational con-

tents to be constructed, the order and the way in which

they will be presented. The Student or Player Mod-

ule has the role of verifying the player’s performance

during the time they are executing the game tasks,

adapting the difﬁculty, providing feedback regarding

Figure 2: Conceptual Framework for Educational Games

Design.

success or failure in certain activities. Finally, the

Graphics and Interface Module is responsible for

issues related to the interface and interaction environ-

ment with which the player interacts, in addition to

graphic issues inherent to the game, such as artistic

style, scenarios, character appearance and colors.

3.2 Constructive Process

First, the CFW was subdivided in a modular way. Af-

ter this modularization and consequent separation of

responsibilities, the process of inclusion of the com-

ponents, called Criteria, that the educational game for

Deaf children will need to meet, began. The process

of deﬁning the components of each module was as

follows:

1. The module’s responsibility was delimited. This

was determined through two questions:

a) What exactly is this module intended for?

b) How far should the responsibilities of this mod-

ule go without overriding the responsibility of the

other modules?

2. Next, the subareas that would serve as the ba-

sis for the selection of the criteria were deﬁned,

then leading to the knowledge ﬁelds to support the

module in question.

3. In cases where there were many intersections be-

tween relevant works in relation to a speciﬁc item,

this element was incorporated as a criterion to the

corresponding module. An example of this pro-

cess, in the Graphics and Interface Module, can

be seen in Figure 3.

Conceptual Framework to Support a Web Authoring Tool of Educational Games for Deaf Children

229

Figure 3: Example of Criterion Constructive Process.

3.3 Framework’s Criteria

Figure 4 brings up the relevant sets of criteria that the

modules should handle. Within each of the modules,

there are the necessary criteria for educational games

to be adequate in order to support the Education of

Deaf children.

In software, an adequate interface and interaction

environment has several beneﬁts for the user’s per-

sonal experience (Barbosa and da Silva, 2010). In

digital games, in addition to the need for the graph-

ical interface to have an adequate level of usability,

there is a need for the graphics of the game to be par-

ticularly suitable for the target audience. In this type

of software, the user spends much more time playing

than interacting with the menus, so special attention

should be paid to graphical issues.

Graphics are the way the game will display the

designer’s world and tell his story. In educational

games, graphics also have the role of visually trans-

mitting the content to be taught. In the proposed Con-

ceptual Framework, the Graphics and Interface Mod-

ule has as its constituent criteria:

• Colors and Shapes (Novak, 2011) (Szczuka

et al., 2013) (Plass et al., 2014) (Shneiderman,

2004): Colors must be strong and lively to please

children. Most important elements on the screen

should have highlight colors. Round shapes and

vivid colors induce positive emotions. These pos-

itive emotions facilitate learning and improve un-

derstanding and transfer of knowledge.

• Consistency (Novak, 2011) (Melonio and Gen-

nari, 2013) (Barbosa and da Silva, 2010): Using

the same items in the same positions and orders

on the interface helps the Deaf child to remember

the features and their functions.

• Simple Menus (Lindgren et al., 2015) (Melonio

and Gennari, 2013) (Boscarioli et al., 2016): In-

teraction with menus should be simple and intu-

itive. Texts should be avoided, since, the writ-

ten form of an oral language is not the natural

language of the Deaf children. Illustrations are

preferred to represent the possible options in the

menus.

• Meaningful Icons (Barzilai and Blau, 2014)

(Szczuka et al., 2013) (Malliarakis et al., 2014)

(Mascio et al., 2013): Icons should be easily

perceived and related to familiar concepts to the

child. Also, the icons should not distract the

child’s attention from the main task. The attention

and focus of the player are essential so that the

performance in the tasks are satisfactory and, con-

sequently, the student can learn the concept being

taught.

• Cartoon Art Style (Boscarioli et al., 2016) (Jab-

bar and Felicia, 2015) (Girard et al., 2013): Art

with children’s appeal is recommended. The ap-

peal and graphic attractiveness of a game has di-

rect implication in the learning outcomes to be ob-

tained with the educational game.

• Proper Feedback (Jabbar and Felicia, 2015)

(Barzilai and Blau, 2014) (Azoubel, 2016) (Laa-

marti et al., 2014): The game communication

with the player must always be as fast and

comprehensible as possible, in graphic form or

through the natural language of the Deaf.

Every game has its own gameplay. At the same

time it has mechanics that make it unique, the game

also has mechanics that resemble other games. These

relatable mechanics allow the game’s categorization

in one or more game genres.

In traditional commercial games, gameplay has

the sole purpose of entertaining and amusing the

player. Educational games, in turn, need to ensure

learning of some content while entertaining, amus-

ing, and maintaining the player’s motivation and at-

tention. For this reason, the gameplay of an educa-

tional game must be intrinsically related to what one

wishes to teach, to whom one wishes to teach, and to

the degree of complexity in which the content may be

taught. Therefore, the Gameplay and Tutoring Mod-

ule is formed by:

• Game Genre (Laamarti et al., 2014) (Malliarakis

et al., 2014) (Schell, 2014) (Dormann et al.,

2013): It should be taken into account at the be-

ginning of the game project. All gaming genres

today can be adapted for educational games, but

not all are suitable for children.

• Instructions (Vigil et al., 2014) (Jabbar and Feli-

cia, 2015) (Khenissi et al., 2015) (Carvalho et al.,

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230

Figure 4: Criteria of the Conceptual Framework.

2015): Instructions should be given at the begin-

ning of the game, from video tutorial or images.

If the game is not able to be self-explanatory to

the child, its educational potential ends up being

wasted as there will be no interest in the player

interacting with what he/she does not understand.

• Game Goals (Song and Zhang, 2008) (Linek

et al., 2010) (Mayer et al., 2014) (del Blanco et al.,

2013): The goals need to be clear and appropri-

ate for children. This means that the Deaf chil-

dren who will play must understand its complex-

ity. Also, the level of the goals’ demands must

be in accordance with the physical and cognitive

capabilities of the target audience.

• Meaningful Choices (Werbach and Hunter,

2012) (Schell, 2014) (Schuytema, 2007): The

game must offer possibilities for the player that

have real impact in the game world.

• Input and Controls (Eseryel et al., 2014) (Mel-

onio and Gennari, 2013) (Eseryel et al., 2014):

Existing native input devices such as keyboard,

mouse and touch screen should have higher prior-

ity over other ones. Number of buttons and com-

mands available to the player should be limited to

avoid excessive complexity.

• Rewards (Carter et al., 2014) (Song and Zhang,

2008) (Omar and Jaafar, 2009): There should be

rewards for the player when he successfully com-

pletes his goals. However, the rewards must be de-

livered at appropriate times. That is, they should

not be too frequent nor too far apart.

• Association with Fields of Experience (Beavis

et al., 2015) (Kingsley and Olufemi, 2015) (An-

netta, 2010): The goals and mechanics of the

game should be directly related to the educational

content the teacher wants to instruct and the ca-

pacities that the student must develop.

The purpose of computer-aided learning environ-

ments is to support teaching-learning in a given sub-

ject or area of knowledge. The main subject of this

process is the student who uses the environment, be

it an educational game, a tutoring system or another

educational application. There is no way to ensure

that the learner has effectively evolved his knowledge

level and really learned if there is not any way of

monitoring and evaluating his progress. Thus, the ob-

jective of the Student or Player Module is to assess

the learner’s performance and progress to verify that

learning has actually occurred and to assist in cases

where the expected goal has not been achieved. This

Conceptual Framework to Support a Web Authoring Tool of Educational Games for Deaf Children

231

module has the following criteria:

• Performance Evaluation (Linek et al., 2010)

(Murray, 2003) (Annetta, 2010) (Ibrahim and Jaa-

far, 2009): The game needs to have a mechanism

to determine the amount of errors, accomplish-

ments, time spent, among other indicators that

measure the player’s performance.

• Scoring (Niederhauser and Stoddart, 2001)

(Barzilai and Blau, 2014) (Yusoff et al., 2009)

(Malliarakis et al., 2014): It is important to have a

visual indicator of player performance, based on

the amount of achievements and value of action

the player performs. Thus, the player himself can

track, in real time, his progress and the outcome

of his actions.

• Improvement Suggestions (Barzilai and Blau,

2014) (Murray, 2003) (Song and Zhang, 2008)

(Nwana, 1990): When the player does not achieve

the expected performance, it is important to have

an assistance mechanism. Feedback should be

given to the player, indicating skills to improve

and how to do this, demonstrating what to focus

on and what are his/her most common mistakes.

• Difﬁculty Adaptation (Dormann et al., 2013)

(Schuytema, 2007) (Novak, 2011) (Annetta,

2010): The game should offer the option to

choose level of difﬁculty. Alternatively, an au-

tomatic difﬁculty adjustment system may be in-

cluded. This prevents a player from leaving the

game, when having a hard time.

• Hints (Linek et al., 2010) (Ibrahim and Jaa-

far, 2009) (Virvou et al., 2005) (Dormann et al.,

2013): Included in many games, tip system is a

feature in which the player, who can not solve a

problem and needs a real-time help, gets assis-

tance. The tips can be, among others, suggestions

of upcoming moves for the player that is having

difﬁculty in proceeding during a match or a stage.

When the designer wants to build an educational

game for Deaf children, the choice of game content is

not trivial. The determination of which contents are

taught to what ages is the result of years of study by

researchers in the area of Education and Pedagogy.

Therefore, in order to ensure that content of an

educational game is appropriate and relevant to the

target audience, it is necessary to have a teaching

methodology that supports the pedagogical basis of

the game in question. These are the responsibilities

of the Module of Teaching-Learning, which has the

following criteria:

• Fields of Experience (Brasil, 2017) (Brasil,

2009) (Lindgren et al., 2015) (Felipe, 2012): The-

matic concepts to be addressed in the game should

take into account the instructional objectives of

Deaf Children’s Education.

• Rights of Learning (del Blanco et al., 2013)

(Brasil, 2017) (Brasil, 2009): The player must

learn by playing relevant concepts and contents in

Early Childhood Education, that support the child

development.

• Game Goals Association (Arnab et al., 2015)

(Kingsley and Olufemi, 2015) (Mayer et al.,

2014) (Beavis et al., 2015): Each goal to be

achieved in the game must be related to the teach-

ing of a relevant concept or educational content.

• Sing Language (in Brazil’s case: Libras)

(Khenissi et al., 2015) (Mascio et al., 2013) (Mel-

onio and Gennari, 2013) (Lindgren et al., 2015):

The contents to be taught should be presented

in SL. Language learning is one of the goals of

games. The natural language of Deaf children is

the Sign Language of their linguistic communities

in each country.

• Child Learning Support (Khenissi et al., 2015)

(Mascio et al., 2013) (Melonio and Gennari,

2013) (Lindgren et al., 2015): The game must be

seen as a complementary tool for the teaching and

learning of the child. It is not the main tool; the

teacher presence must not be overlooked.

4 RESULTS

Alongside with empowering game designers with

competence to build suitable educational games for

Deaf children, the conceptual framework also has as

result an authoring tool. The tool enables Deaf chil-

dren teachers to generate educational games. It allows

the access to a database of images and their respective

themes for in-game use. In addition to accessing the

database, the tool allows the teacher to include new

signs and illustrations for later use by other authors

who will require the tool to create their own games.

4.1 Authoring Tool

The proposed authoring tool is free to use, open and

on-line. That is to say, teachers and illustrators from

all over the country who want to contribute with

new images, Libras’ signs or other elements to the

database, can easily include them in the server and

share them. The tool has an intuitive interaction envi-

ronment that can be used by professionals who work

with education of Deaf children but do not understand

programming.

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232

As the framework supports the authoring tool, the

teacher who wishes to create a game for his Deaf

students using the authoring tool, will necessarily be

grounded on the Conceptual Framework. Thus, when

building a game from the tool, the game generated

will be modularized according to the FWC’s modular

structure, that is, with each of its four modules.

In addition, the constituent criteria of the modules,

which deﬁne the essential characteristics in an educa-

tional game for Deaf children, will be guaranteed in

the game created. Therefore, the generated game will

have clear objectives associated with the educational

content. It will also have a form of evaluation and

assistance to the player during his playing time, rel-

evant content for the target age group, and interface

and graphics adapted to the speciﬁcities of Deaf chil-

dren.

4.2 Game Generated

Currently, the tool is prepared to generate educational

games of the point-and-click adventure genre. As an

example, a generated game is shown in Figure 5. In

this game, the player needs to ﬁnd all the animals ex-

hibited in the stage scenario, while trying to avoid

enemies and distractors. When the player success-

fully encounters an animal, he receives positive feed-

back and a balloon with the corresponding sign in Li-

bras pictorial representation is displayed. Then, four

options of words in Portuguese are presented, in or-

der to verify if the player knows how this concept

is represented in the Portuguese language as well. If

the player is right once again, his score is increased.

When the player ﬁnds all the required objects in the

stage, within the time limit, he successfully ends the

stage.

Figure 5: Generated Adventure Game.

This game is based on a study that carried out

a research and consulting project at a school of the

Deaf in Recife city. This project elaborated games in

Libras for the pedagogical work with Deaf children

from 2 to 6 years old (Felipe, 1988). The referred

project also based the development of a set of puz-

zle video games for Deaf children education (Canteri,

2014). The games work with semantic groups so that

the child can learn signs and understand the concept

of the sign and its relation to the group, such as hy-

giene, animals, transportation.

5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORKS

This work presented contributions to the ﬁeld of

Game Design and Informatics in Education. The in-

terdisciplinary and transdisciplinary nature of the re-

search process, involving researchers from the Deaf

Children’s Education, the Human-Computer Interac-

tion and Informatics in Education areas, ensures the

robustness of the results.

The proposed framework enables professional

game developers and game designers to build ade-

quate educational games for Deaf children. The pro-

posed framework was validated with its application in

the development of a web authoring tool that allows

the generation of educational games for Deaf children

in a suitable and semi-automatic way.

On the other hand, the web authoring tool allows

teachers of Early Childhood Education, without any

programming or advanced computer skills, to create

their own educational games for their students. This

authoring tool was implemented in order to validate

the proposed framework, that is, to demonstrate that

it is possible to generate an educational game for deaf

children. In this way, the paper answered both the

research questions raised.

As ﬁrst indicated future work, the authoring tool

will be used and tested in schools, by teachers of Deaf

children along with the incorporation of the resulting

games in educational practice. It is also possible to

point out as a potential future work the expansion of

the conceptual framework to support the design of ed-

ucational games for other ages and speciﬁcities.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This study was ﬁnanced in part by the Coordenac¸

de Aperfeic¸oamento de Pessoal de N

ıvel Superior -

Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001.

Conceptual Framework to Support a Web Authoring Tool of Educational Games for Deaf Children

233

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