This article presents a review of the design methods and techniques that have been used to involve children with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) in the technology design process. Situating the work within the established child-computer interaction research sub-field of participatory design, we examine the progress that has been made in relation to the participation of this specific child population. An extensive review of the literature in this area has been undertaken and we describe the different roles, responsibilities and activities that have been undertaken by both the child and adult participants within previous technology design projects. We also highlight the different types of outcome from this previous work involving children with SEND, exploring the impact the children's participation has had on both the resulting technology as well as the impact on the child participants themselves. Finally we conclude this review with a set of reporting recommendations for technology designers and researchers aiming to involve this population in future technology design projects.

In this paper we present the background, aims and methodology of the ScratchMaths (SM) project, which has designed curriculum materials and professional development (PD) to support mathematical learning through programming for pupils aged between 9 and 11 years. The project was framed by the particular context of computing in the English education system alongside the long history of research and development in programming and mathematics. In this paper, we present a Bframework for action^(diSessa and Cobb, Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13, 77-103, 2004) following design research that looked to develop an evidence-based curriculum intervention around carefully chosen mathematical and computational concepts. As a first step in teasing out factors for successful implementation and addressing any gap between our design intentions and teacher delivery, we focus on two key foundational concepts within the SM curriculum: the concept of algorithm and of 360°total turn. We found that our intervention as a whole enabled teachers with different backgrounds and Digit Exp Math Educ (2017) 3:115-138 DOI 10.1007/s40751-017-0028-x The research reported in this paper forms part of a larger project, the ScratchMaths project 2014-17 funded by the Educational Endowment Foundation. The project is being independently evaluated following a randomized control trial model involving over 100 primary schools across England. Department of Informatics Education, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia levels of confidence to tailor the delivery of the SM in ways that can make these challenging concepts more accessible for both themselves and their pupils.

Self-knowledge concerns one’s own preferences and personality. It pertains to the self (similar to episodic memory), yet does not concern events. It is factual (like semantic memory), but also idiosyncratic. For these reasons, it is unclear where self-knowledge might fall on a continuum in relation to semantic and episodic memory. In this study, we aimed to compare the event-related potential (ERP) correlates of self-knowledge to those of semantic and episodic memory, using N400 and Late Positive Component (LPC) as proxies for semantic and episodic processing, respectively. We considered an additional factor: time perspective. Temporally distant selves have been suggested to be more semantic compared to the present self, but thinking about one’s past and future selves may also engage episodic memory. Twenty-eight adults answered whether traits (e.g., persistent) were true of most people holding an occupation (e.g. soldiers; semantic memory condition), or true of themselves 5 years ago, in the present, or 5 years from now (past, present, and future self-knowledge conditions). The study ended with an episodic recognition memory task for previously seen traits. Present self-knowledge produced mean LPC amplitudes at posterior parietal sites that fell between semantic and episodic memory. Mean LPC amplitudes for past and future self-knowledge were greater than for semantic memory, and not significantly different from episodic memory. Mean N400 amplitudes for the self-knowledge conditions were smaller than for semantic memory at sagittal sites. However, this N400 effect was not separable from a preceding P200 effect at these same electrode sites. This P200 effect can be interpreted as reflecting the greater emotional salience of self as compared to general knowledge, which may have facilitated semantic processing. Overall, our findings are consistent with a distinction between knowledge of others and self-knowledge, but the closeness of self-knowledge’s neural correlates to either semantic or episodic memory appears to depend to some extent on time perspective

This paper focuses on a major part of a two-year intervention, ScratchMaths (SM), which seeks to exploit programming for the learning of mathematics. The SM hypothesis is that given the right design of curriculum, pedagogy and digital tools, pupils can engage with and express important mathematical ideas through computer programming. We describe the overall design of SM and as an illustration of the approach, we elaborate a more detailed description of the specific SM activities that seek to harness the programming concept of 'objects communicating with one another' for the exploration of the mathematical concept of place value through a syntonic approach to learning. We report a case study of how these activities were implemented in two primary classes. Our findings constitute a kind of existence theorem: that with carefully designed and sequenced learning activities and appropriate teacher support, this approach can allow pupils to engage with difficult mathematical ideas in new, meaningful and generalisable ways. We also point to the challenges which emerged through this process in ensuring pupils encounter these mathematical ideas.

In the past technology products created to overcome accessibility and usability issues experienced by individuals with special needs have also resulted in greater usability for the wider population. Recently, researchers have developed tailored approaches to involving special needs populations in the process of designing this technology, but it is not known if these approaches could also benefit participation in a wider population. This paper investigates the potential benefits of using a new participatory design (PD) approach, tailored to meet the specific needs of a minority group, children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD), for typically developing (TD) children (i.e. mainstream school children). Our approach, known as IDEAS (an Interface Design Experience for the Autistic Spectrum), provides structure and additional support targeted at specific ASD impairments, with the level of support able to be tailored to the needs of individual children. A study has been undertaken to trial this approach with two TD design teams. The findings reveal that the children benefited from the additional structure within the idea generation process, enabling them to feel more comfortable sharing and developing their ideas, as well as interacting with other group members.

The concept of gamification is receiving increasing amounts of attention, particularly for its potential to motivate students. However, to date the majority of studies in the context of education have predominantly focused on University students. This paper explores how gamification could potentially benefit a specific student population, children with dyslexia who are transitioning from primary to secondary school. Two teachers from specialist dyslexia teaching centres used classDojo, a gamification platform, during their teaching sessions for one term. We detail how the teachers appropriated the platform in different ways and how the students discussed classDojo in terms of motivation. These findings have subsequently informed a series of provisional design recommendations, presented within the paper, regarding how gamification platforms could be optimised for students with dyslexia. We also examine the benefits of our exploratory approach with regards to theory building that can be tested in confirmatory research. We conclude by arguing that our work can serve as a springboard for discussing how gamification platforms could be of use for students with other special educational needs.

In his geographical treatise of 1537, the Portuguese chronicler D. João de Castra explained that it would be possible to correlate all newly discovered lands with astronomical markers to produce an accurate map of the world. The result would be, he wrote, a “true and perfect geography.” The movement toward this vision, from the cartographic revolution of thirteenth-century Portolan charts to the use of surveying to map colonial territories in the nineteenth century, is a compelling narrative of the rationalization of space, and of the reinforcement of this trend by the pursuit of European imperial interests.

There is equivocal evidence as to whether there is a deficit in recognising emotional expressions in Autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study compared emotion recognition in ASD in three types of emotion expression media (still image, dynamic image, auditory) across human stimuli (e.g. photo of a human face) and animated stimuli (e.g. cartoon face). Participants were 37 adolescents (age 11-16) with a diagnosis of ASD (33 male, 4 female). 42 males and 39 females served as typically developing, age-matched controls. Overall there was significant advantage for control groups over the ASD group for emotion recognition in human stimuli but not animated stimuli, across modalities. For static animated images specifically, those with ASD significantly outperformed controls. The findings are consistent with the ASD group using atypical explicit strategies.