Adapting an Educational Game for Spanish Orthography to make it Adaptive and Accessible Cristina Carmona, David Bueno, Miguel A. Jiménez Departamento de Lenguajes y Ciencias de la Computación, Universidad de Málaga, Spain {cristina, bueno, majimenez}@lcc.uma.es Abstract This paper explains SAMO, an educational game for Spanish orthography. The game is an evolution of MITO, which was evaluated with real students. Using information obtained from this evaluation, which highlighted some shortcomings from the pedagogical and access point of view, a new game has been developed, using a new architecture, with a new teaching methodology and accessibility features. 1. Introduction Electronic educational games are learning and recreational environments that try to increase learner motivation by embedding pedagogical activities into highly enjoyable interactions. On the other hand, in the last few years there has been a considerable growth in on-line educational data, and specifically educational games. Therefore it is becoming essential that these games be adaptive, since it is desirable that an educational game adapts to the student (in both presentation and content), and that it be accessible in order to provide equal access and equal opportunity to all users. Also, it is very important that educational games be accessible in order to be used in public schools. Our work is focused in the design of an educational game for Spanish orthography for the web. Orthography has been chosen because the ability to write correctly is an essential skill throughout both educational and working life. The most significant difference between English and Spanish orthography, is that, in the case of Spanish, there are rules determining how words are spelt. There are many educational games to teach Spanish orthography on- line, like [1][2][3]. These games are focused to teach the rules. However, from the nearly 600 rules that exist, only a few are really useful (in the sense that they contemplate many words and few exceptions). So, in this work we design a new educational game for Spanish orthography not based on “teaching the rules” but in the ideas proposed in the Neuro-Linguistic Programming Model for orthography presented in [4]: for our purposes, orthography will be used as a synonym for “correctly spelling the words”. Therefore our main goal will be to teach the strategies applied by good spellers. Solving exercises is not effective if the mental strategy is wrong, so it is fundamental to teach a mental process, which can be described as follows: when in doubt, good writers mentally search for the image of the word and try to visualize it. Good writing becomes then recalling the image of the word, previously stored in the mind. This visual recall of the word might be good enough to be sure of its correctness, but in some cases good writers clarify doubts by writing the word in different ways. Next section briefly explain our previous work (MITO), an educational game for Spanish orthography which evaluation have caused the development of SAMO. 2. Previous Work MITO (which stands for Multimedia Intelligent Tutor of Orthography) is a stand-alone application which focuses on helping children between 8 and 12 years old learn Spanish orthography [3]. The contents in MITO are divided into four modules, each one aiming to teach words corresponding to different sets of rules. A first formative evaluation of the MITO system has been performed [5]. This evaluation had two main goals: a) to determine the degree of acceptance of the game among the users it was aimed at, identifying relevant aspects that could improve learner motivation and b) to study the effectiveness of the game in helping children to learn orthography, identifying possible ways to improve the design and behavior of the system from an educational point of view. Regarding the motivational aspects, the initial results were very encouraging. Children did indeed become very engaged with the game, but regarding the effectiveness, results were not so good. This evaluation showed some weaknesses in the system: 1) Some of the exercises of MITO consist of students choosing between correctly and incorrectly written words. This kind of exercise based on identifying orthographical