Character Alive: A Tangible Reading and Writing System for Chinese Children At-risk for Dyslexia Min Fan Simon Fraser University 250-13450 102 Ave, Surrey, B.C. Canada minf@sfu.ca Jianyu Fan Simon Fraser University 250-13450 102 Ave, Surrey, B.C. Canada jianyuf@sfu.ca Alissa N. Antle Simon Fraser University 250-13450 102 Ave, Surrey, B.C. Canada aantle@sfu.ca Sheng Jin Communication University of Zhejiang 998 Xueyuan St, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China sjin@zjicm.edu.cn Dongxu Yin Communication University of Zhejiang 998 Xueyuan St, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China yindongxv@gmail.com Philippe Pasquier Simon Fraser University 250-13450 102 Ave, Surrey, B.C. Canada pasquier@sfu.ca ABSTRACT 1 This paper presents Character Alive, a tangible system designed to improve early Chinese literacy acquisition for Mandarin-speaking children at-risk for dyslexia by enabling high-level interaction. Character Alive uses the multisensory training method to teach children the reading and writing of Chinese characters and words. The core design features of our system are dynamic color cues, 2D radical cards and handwriting cards with tactile cues, and multimedia content such Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). CHI’19 Extended Abstracts, May 4-9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland, UK. © 2019 Copyright is held by the owner/ author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5971-9/19/05. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3312756 CHI 2019 Late-Breaking Work CHI 2019, May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland, UK LBW0113, Page 1