D.D. Schmorrow and C.M. Fidopiastis (Eds.): FAC 2011, HCII 2011, LNAI 6780, pp. 462–471, 2011. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 Learning in Virtual Worlds: A New Path for Supporting Cognitive Impaired Children Laura A. Ripamonti and Dario Maggiorini Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione, Università degli Studi di Milano via Comelico, 39 I-20135 Milano, Italy {ripamonti,dario}@dico.unimi.it Abstract. We have adopted the serious game perspective to design, develop, and test a prototypal application, in a virtual world, aimed at teaching children affected by Down Syndrome how to read a clock. The main idea has been to of- fer them a new and intriguing learning environment to reduce the sense of fru- stration they often are burdened with during educational activities. In particular, an approach based on serious gaming has been coupled with the Feuerstein’s method, which is currently spreading as an effective support to teaching activi- ties aimed at impaired kids. The prototype has been developed adopting a play- centric process and has been tested with a group of children who were unable to read the time. Keywords: serious games; videogames; healthcare; virtual world; usability; augmented cognition, Down Syndrome. 1 Introduction Nowadays, women tend to have their first child at an older age than in the past. This is positively correlated with the increase in the percentage of newborns with Down syndrome (DS), as shown in Tab. 1. Although all the efforts made by scholars and re- searchers in the medical field, it is not yet possible to prevent nor to cure DS. The only viable way to help these children to increase the quality of their lives (i.e., from the independence and autonomy point of view) is through appropriate “rehabilitation” therapies, aimed at supporting them to achieve more advanced cognitive, linguistic, and motional capabilities [5]. In particular, the most serious difficulties afflicting children with DS are related to the cognitive side [17, 34]: hence, it is particularly relevant to improve the methodolo- gies aimed at developing cognitive capabilities and skills. Among several possible ap- proaches to this problem, one whose diffusion has increased during the last decade is rooted into the theories developed by Reuven Feuerstein [2, 10, 11, 12]. Feuerstein’s methodology is now adopted not only in the pedagogical field, but also in clinical environments, aiming at stimulating cognition in DS children. Its major advantage is to avoid the iterative processes typical of more “traditional” rehabilitative approaches, and to focus on stimulating a problem solving attitude, exploiting the innate capability of human brain to self-modify, evolve, and adapt – even under disadvantaged conditions. The application of the Feuerstein method requires the presence of a special