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Abstract. Approximately 4-10% of the German population suffers from developmental dyslexia. The learning disorder afffects educational, personal, and social development of children in a negative way. Mobile serious games have the potential to support dyslexic primary-school children in addition to school support and learning therapy. We propose such a mobile serious game called "Prosodiya", with the help of which dyslexic children can improve their reading and writing performance. Prosodiya includes innovative and evidence-based interventions that focus on improving the awareness of linguistic features related to syllable stress. We report the results of a pilot study of a preliminary version of the game. Results indicate that the children enjoyed playing the game, that their motivation was maintained, and that they wanted more levels.

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The choice of appropriate interaction style for children's application has been a divisive subject of debate. For example, drag-and-drop is often said to perform worse than point-and-click in educational applications -and vice versa. In this paper, we argue for the need to choose the interaction style in context, considering a range of factors. We compare drag-and-drop, pointand-touch, and simple touch for selecting letters to form words in a spelling line as part of an educational spelling game. We evaluate the perceived workload, user experience, preference, and writing times of twenty-five children (8-11 years), eight of whom were dyslexic. We found that touch received better ratings and was ranked highest most often on all subscales compared to drag-and-drop and point-and-touch. Children needed less time using touch and 68% chose it as their favorite interaction style. We also found small advantages for drag-and-drop over pointand-touch, which runs counter to some recent recommendations. This becomes particularly clear when using ranking responses, which support a particularly fine-grained picture.

Developmental dyslexia is one of the most frequent learning disorders and affects 4-10 % of the German population. The learning disorder affects educational, personal, and social development of children in a negative way. We examine three different approaches to treat learning disorders. That is, therapeutic, computer-based, and digital game-based interventions. We reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches that have been shown to be supportive for dyslexic primary-school children. Our literature review shows that there is a lack of digital game-based interventions for the treatment of spelling disorders. To fill this gap, we propose such a mobile serious game which uses evidence-based trainings and introduces novel features in order to help dyslexic children to improve their reading and spelling performance. We propose an intervention to train awareness of syllable stress and explore the innovative use of mouth motor activities and embodied trainings. To conclude, we suggest that, in addition to traditional approaches, digital-game based approaches should be used supplementary to (re-) engage and motivate learners.

This paper presents COAST, a web-based application to easily and automatically enhance syllable structure, word stress, and spacing in texts, that was designed in close collaboration with learning therapists to ensure its practical relevance. Such syllable-enhanced texts are commonly used in learning therapy or private tuition to promote the recognition of syllables in order to improve reading and writing skills.In a state of the art solutions for automatic syllable enhancement, we put special emphasis on syllable stress and support specific marking of the primary syllable stress in words. Core features of our tool are i) a highly customizable text enhancement and template functionality, and ii) a novel crowd-sourcing mechanism that we employ to address the issue of data sparsity in language resources. We successfully tested COAST with real-life practitioners in a series of user tests validating the concept of our framework.

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Despite its potential to support reading and spelling development in children with or without dyslexia, research on the effectiveness of digital trainings carried out at home is scarce. This study investigated the effectiveness of a novel digital game-based spelling training for unassisted use at home (Prosodiya). The pedagogical approach differs from similar approaches as it systematically teaches orthographic knowledge in combination with syllable stress awareness. A sample of 116 German second- to fourth-grade children with mainly poor spelling skills participated in a randomized two-period, wait-list controlled field trial, in which children practiced at home over 9–10 weeks with Prosodiya. Results showed high participant engagement, as indicated by behavioral measures of student responsiveness, and they validate our novel pedagogical approach. Most importantly, results revealed significant training effects on syllable stress awareness and spelling abilities in trained and untrained domains. This training may thus expand the traditional pool of training methods.