Intervention game

By Ward Dehairs, October 1, 2018

The Intervention game is an intelligent game made for the purpose to train and measure listening comprehension in young children, for speech sounds edited in some specific way.

I made the game from scratch for ExpORL, a subsection of the medical department of the KULeuven concerned with speech, hearing and neurological disorders such as dyslexia.

The game had a fair amount of work go into it, to make the map level, the core functionality, the virtual shop and all the items for the children to buy at the shop. You can get a quick overview of the game's contents in the video below:

The game was used as part of a peer-reviewd study, which was in turn a part of the PhD project of Femke Vanden Bempt. You can find it on pubmed. Find full text here.

Paper excerpt

This study evaluates the enjoyment and feasibility of a tablet-based, serious story-listening game for kindergarteners, developed based on the principles of the GameFlow model. This study also preliminarily explores the possibility of using the game to foster language comprehension. [...] Generally, the story game seemed enjoyable and feasible. However, the GameFlow model evaluation and predictive relationships imply room for further game design improvements. Furthermore, our results cautiously suggest the potential of the game to foster language comprehension; however, future randomized controlled trials should further elucidate the impact on language comprehension.