Designing a General Open Authorable Digital Ecosystem for Educational Games to Support Special Learning Needs

This chapter presents the design and the architecture of the IOLAOS (IOLAOS in ancient Greece was a divine hero famed for helping with some of Heracles’s labors) platform, a general open authorable ecosystem, aiming to increase the effectiveness of serious games for experts (researchers, specialists), carers (teachers, trainers, parents), and users (adults, schoolers, preschoolers) of socially, physically, or technologically disadvantaged groups. In this context the main ambition of IOLAOS is to introduce the design and the tools for (a) enabling experts (theorists, physiologists, pedagogues, etc.) to codify therapy/recovery styles/limitations and pedagogical methods into game creation guidelines; (b) allowing carers (teachers, trainers, parents, etc.) to create educational and/or rehabilitation games based on the experts’ codified guidelines, curriculum, and user specifics; (c) permitting users (adults, schoolers, preschoolers, etc.) to customize, to a certain point, the game according to their preferences and desires and play games alone or in groups with or without their carer’s supervision; and (d) enabling experts or carers to evaluate playing sessions and come to pedagogical and recovery conclusions/decisions. This platform will contribute to domains as diverse as healthcare and education. As a use case presented in this chapter, IOLAOS is applied for the scenario of teaching preschoolers with autism diagnosis. Children with autism have been reported to exhibit deficits in the recognition of affective expressions and the perception of emotions. In regard to this, the proposed approach with the suggested ecosystem creates a game to support interventions to eliminate such deficits.