V.V. Das, E. Ariwa, and S.B. Rahayu (Eds.): SPIT 2011, LNICST 62, pp. 16–20, 2012. © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2012 An Arabic-Based Tutorial System for Children with Special Needs Moutaz Saleh 1 , Jihad Mohamad Aljaam 1 , Ali Jaoua 1 , Abdulmotaleb Elsaddik 2 1 Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar {moutaz.saleh,jaam,jaoua}@qu.edu.qa 2 School of information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa, Canada elsaddik@mcrlab.uottawa.ca Abstract. In spite of the current advance of the use of computers in education in the Arab world, complete suites of solutions for students with special needs are very scarce. This paper presents an assistive system managing learning content for children with intellectual challenges. The system provides educational multimedia contents, inspired from the local environment, in different subjects such as math and science to target specific learning goals. The system tracks the individual student progress against the student individualized learning plan assigned by the teachers and according to their abilities. Upon completion of learning a particular task, the system will test the learner to order a set of sub-tasks in its logical sequence necessary to successfully accomplish the main task. The system also facilitates deploying intelligent tutoring algorithms to automatically correct mistakes after a number of trials working adaptively with the learner to successfully learn how to complete the task. Keywords: Intellectual Disability, Computerized Learning, Educational Multimedia Contents, Personalized Learning. 1 Introduction Since more than two decades, the use of computer as an assistive teaching tool shows a significant improvement in learning process especially for school children [1, 2]. Besides, with the continuous development of computer software and applications, it becomes attractive to use computers in teaching children with intellectual disabilities. This can be clearly seen through the possibility of teaching students according to their level of abilities and speed of interaction, providing a continuous feedback, and motivating them with interactive educational multimedia contents [3]. Indeed, lots of research studies [4, 5, 6] show the great benefit of using computer to effectively enhance the teaching process for such kind of children who require special and continuous training in order to facilitate their learning process [7]. In the State of Qatar, it is estimated to have more than 3% of children with some intellectual challenges. This percentage is higher in the MEAN region. The educational needs for such children should not be ignored considering the importance of building their skills and merging them into the society. Recently, in 2010, the population statistics in