A Chemistry Inclusive and Educational Serious Game
Paula Maria Escudeiro, Nuno Escudeiro, Márcia Campos Gouveia · 2022
Promoting equal opportunities and social inclusion of disabled people is a concern of modern society and a key issue in European Education. The evolution of science and the emerging new technologies promote social inclusion and might gear traditional learning environments with the required features to assure disabled people face the same learning opportunities as all. Our current work brings in R&D world-class results in the field of Educational Serious Games, to help students to learn and to assimilate subjects related to the Chemistry study field. Chemistry subjects pose significant challenges to junior and high-school students. Chemistry is a hard learning subject that students are usually reluctant to learn through the traditional teaching/learning methods. Reading Chemistry class books for long hours is not very effective; this drawback is even more serious when it comes to students that do not master oral languages or face other disabilities. In this paper we describe a developed serious game meant to be educational and inclusive, to help high school Chemistry students to learn and explore the Table of Periodic Elements and the composition of molecules. The inclusive components of the game address several disabilities, such as color blindness, hearing, and mobility impairments. Adequate color themes, to enable color blind students, sign language, to enable hearing-impaired students, sensorial devices to enable mobility impaired students, will be provided to play the game without any stigma. High-Level Requirements will be established. The game has been required to be supported by a Serious Games architecture and Inclusive Games Standards. To meet these needs, several requirements must be met as part of the development such as Biometric Sensor; Beacons; Augmented Reality; Georeferencing; Multiplatform; Multiplayer; Closed source; DLC; and DDA.