EXPANDABLE MULTIMEDIA SOFTWARE FOR CHILDREN SUFFERING FROM DYSLEXIA 

Rita Mátrai1, Zsolt Tibor Kosztyán2, Cecília Lányi Ph.D3

 1Student, Department of Image Processing and Neurocomputing, University of Veszprém
2Ph.D Student, Department of Management, University of Veszprém
3Associate Professor, Department of Image Processing and Neourocomputing , University of Veszprém

15-25% of children in the world have difficulties with reading. [2] It can be caused by injury of vision or hearing, verbal or linguistic deficiencies, troubles in spatial orientation, recollection debility, debility in dividing talking into elementary parts, lack of concentration, motivation troubles or maybe the parents’ relation to reading. [1]
In the presentation a program is introduced which promotes children (especially who suffer from dyslexia) to become acquainted with characters, words and reading. There is an external database belonging to the program and storing the exercises. The database contains texts to be read, pictures, animations, sounds and text files containing the result of pupils in a determinate directory system. Teachers can modify and expand this database arbitrarily, so they can compile tasks suitable for special claims. A further advantage of expandability is that the software can be rewritten in other languages without any programming. English and German versions are also being developed.
Writing and developing interactive multimedia programs are complicated and need a lot of time with conventional programming languages, e.g. with Pascal or C++. So the exercises were written in Macromedia Director MX, the setting panels in Borland Delphi. The latter one is a high level object oriented visual programming language which makes design of dialog boxes, processing text files and manipulate databases easy and fast. [3,4]
For treating the problems of children suffering from dyslexia there have been some programs made earlier as well. But for such a program, which is expandable, there were no attempts done. Many ardent teachers need to be able to compile tasks suitable for special claims. It is easy to do it with the external database. We also plan to prepare a teacher module that makes compiling new tasks, expanding and modifying the database even easier. The program is being tested by pupils of 6-14 ages in several elementary schools.
References

[1] Meixner Ildikó: Útmutató az olvasó- és feladatlapok használatához, Tankönyvkiadó, Budapest, 1978
[2] FigyelőNet: Írás- és olvasászavar – karrier kizárva? http://fn.netrix.hu/cikk.php?id=24&cid=61915
[3] Using Director MX, Macromedia Director MX, San Francisco, 2002
[4] Marco Cantú: Delphi 7 Mesteri Szinten - I. Kötet, Kiskapu Kiadó, Budapest, 2003