Effectiveness of New Multimedia Therapy Tested at ETH

Primary School Kids Test Multimedia Learning Game for Dyslexic Children Developed at ETH

12 April 2006

These days people who walk past a certain computer lab in the IFW building on Wednesday or Friday afternoon witness something extraordinary for ETH standards: instead of students in their early twenties, primary school kids with headsets eagerly bend over the computers and pepper their tutors with questions.

By Katja Abrahams

Three Month Study at the Department of Computer Science

The children are aged eight to ten and fulfill an important task. In a three 3-month study they are testing the effectiveness of a new multimedia therapy for children with dyslexia and reading disabilities. The large scale user experiment started at the end of March 2006 at the Department of Computer Science of ETH Zurich in collaboration with the Institute of Neuropsychology at the University of Zurich. It involves 80 kids and will end in mid-July.

Five times a week the kids study at home with the training program "Dybuster" for 15 to 20 minutes. Their learning progress is saved onto a memory stick which the little test persons take with them when they come to ETH once a week to practice and ask questions.

Combination of Findings in Psychology and Computer Science

The concept of the multimedia orthography learning game Dybuster was developed over several years by Markus Gross, professor of computer science and director of the Computer Graphics Laboratory at ETH, and refined by his assistant Christian Vögeli. The program follows a unique approach by combining scientific results in psychology with findings from branches of computer science, e.g. information and coding theory, machine learning and 3D-game technology.

"Dyslexic people have difficulties in conveying spoken language to written language and vice versa. These troubles are caused by cerebral malfunctioning regarding auditory and visual processing", explains PhD student Christian Vögeli. "This is why Dybuster tries to approach the children in question with stimuli they are more receptive to, such as color and music."

Fun and Progress in Orthography at the Same Time

Dybuster contains three different learning games, complementing each other, which appeal to the kids through their playful three-dimensional computer graphics. The letters of the alphabet are divided into different groups, and to each group corresponds a different color and musical sound. Each word is split into its syllables and represented by a three-dimensional graph. Thus the children are supposed to learn little by little the orthography of the 10 000 most common words of the German language. For each correctly-spelled word the player obtains points and is rewarded by a small graphic animation. Dybuster calculates the next exercise individually for each user based on their progress.

Study Evaluation in September

The little test users are very enthusiastic about their new favorite pastime: „Some kids cannot get enough of their 'new computer game'. After the first week we had to distribute a new version of Dybuster which switches off automatically when the training time is over”, says Christian Vögeli. He hopes that apart from the fun of it, Dybuster will also bring the expected progress in reading and writing. To what extent this is the case will be revealed in September when the results of the study will be available.

For further information regarding the study, please visit http://graphics.ethz.ch/dybuster