DESIGNING SERIOUS GAMES FOR HABILITATION AND LEARNING - FROM EAR TRAINING TO SINGING

Abstract

Serious games are those designed for purposes other than pure entertainment. In scenarios where traditional applications are less attractive to users due to their lack of fun factors, serious games comes for the rescue by transforming boring and tedious tasks into enjoyable experiences. We propose the design of a serious games for the purpose of habilitation and learning, more specifically, for musical ear training and singing for the hearing impaired children — SECCIMA, which is a game designed for music habilitation of children with cochlear implants, aiming at promoting music appreciation by enhancing pitch perception and production abilities of CI users. The iterative design process that involved 16 cochlear implant users is documented, and a controlled comparison study (involving another 12 cochlear implant users) between SECCIMA and a baseline system was conducted. Our results show that the newly designed interface is more intuitive and user-friendly compared to the baseline.