Scientific objectives
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Objective 1To gain a deeper understanding of the rhythmic and motoric capabilities of typically developing, visual impaired, and dyslexic children at different stages of their development (6-7yo and 8-10yo) through carrying out psychophysical experiments.
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Objective 2Identifying the primary and most suitable sensory modality to teach typically developing children different arithmetical and geometrical concepts.
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Objective 3
Identifying the sensory modalities that can effectively supplement the primary sensory modality when this is compromised in visually impaired and dyslexic.
Pedagogical objectives
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Objective 4Defining a multisensory embodied and enactive pedagogical framework for teaching and learning arithmetical and geometrical concepts with primary school children, exploiting art – namely music and drawing – as mediator of the learning experience.
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Objective 5Understanding how and the extent to which the developed pedagogical framework can be applied to both typically developing and dyslexic and visual impaired children, in order to overcome barriers and promote social inclusion of impaired children.
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Objective 6Evaluating the pedagogical effectiveness of this new paradigm and of the developed technology for both typically developing and impaired children.
Technological objectives
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Objective 7Developing a library of software modules for analysis of nonverbal motoric expressive and social behaviour of both individuals and small groups of children and for real-time control of sound, music, haptic, and visual feedback.
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Objective 8Developing a library of software modules for multimodal (tactile, motor) analysis of nonverbal behaviour to capture the child’s learning-related affective states.
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Objective 9
Developing an integration hardware and software platform, supporting multiple different input and output devices, and scalable to different learning environments (e.g. school and home), integrating the above-mentioned libraries and supporting design and development of serious games.
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Objective 10
Developing three serious games, exploiting both the envisaged platform and libraries, and applying the art-inspired multisensory embodied and enactive pedagogical framework developed in the project. The first serious game concerns learning arithmetic through music, the second one addresses learning geometry through drawing, and the third one is a proof-of-concept of shared and social learning, for groups including typically developed and impaired children.
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Objective 11
Developing tools for early diagnosis of dyslexia, grounding on recent evidence that problems in rhythm perception can be an indicator for dyslexia.