PhonoBlocks

Project Overview

New technologies, such as tangibles and touch tablets with haptic feedback, may provide solutions for helping dyslexic children learn to read. Tangible letters that can be encoded with graphical or haptic information may enable dyslexic children to better decode them. For example, color coding, used by syntheses, may enable reliable 2D decoding. Haptic feedback can be used to encode letters with signature movements. Tablets combined with augmented reality and physical letters can also enable multimodal interaction and digital feedback. In this project we are exploring these strategies and others. The main research outcome is to determine if any of these strategies improve reading outcomes for dyslexic children, and how to scale and deploy solutions broadly to make them accessible to children at home and in schools.

Team

• Dr. Alissa N. Antle: Project Lead
• Dr. Maureen Hoskyn (previous advisor): Director, Centre for Research on Early Child Health and Education, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University.
• Dr. Alyssa Wise (previous advisor): Professor of Learning Sciences and Educational Technology, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University.

Graduate Students

• Min Fan, Post-Doctoral Fellow (now Assistant Professor, School of Animation and Digital Arts, Communication University of China)
• Victor Cheung, Post-Doctoral Fellow (now Lecturer, Computer Science, SFU)
• Shubhra Sarker, MSc. (now software developer, Fortinet)
• Boxiao Gong, PhD student
• Emily Cramer, MSc. (now developer, Google)
• Ying Deng, MSc. (now user experience, Copperleaf)
• Jianyu Fan, Ph.D. Candidate