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group of six students from Gadjah Mada University (UGM) in Yogyakarta calling themselves the LexiPal team created a form of game therapy to help people with dyslexia.

Developed as a dyslexia therapy application based on the Microsoft X-Box Kinect platform, the game is designed to help students with dyslexia to balance functions between their right and left brains, thus helping them to cope with difficulties in understanding symbols and letters.

For its work, the team was recognized as runner-up in the information technology (IT) category during the recent Mandiri Young Technopreneurship competition in Jakarta.

“People with dyslexia have difficulties in spelling words and with letters. Forcing them to do so only makes them get bored and in turn can make them lazy to learn,” LexiPal member Vremita Desectia Amretasari said over the
weekend.

Of LexiPal’s six members, four are from the university’s IT program, namely Muhammad Risqi Utama Saputra, Kuntoro Adi Nugroho, Vina Sectiana Amretadewi, Taufiq Almahsyur, while Fransiska Vena studies accounting and Vremita majors in French literature.

Vremita said that the team became interested in dyslexia after reading a 2006 report released by the US Department of Health and Human Services that said 10 percent of the world’s population suffered from dyslexia.

Dyslexia, she said, was medically difficult to cure but could be managed through therapy. “We learned more about dyslexia after deciding to join the information technology competition,” she said.

As part of its research, the team consulted reference books on the subject and visited with psycho-logists.

LexiPal also conducted surveys in schools and study workshops for children with dyslexia, which allowed time for interviews and behavioral observation. “We finally came up with an IT teaching system,” Risqi said.

The team developed an educational game for the Kinect platform, an extension of the Microsoft X-Box that recognizes speech and users’ body movements.

Among its features, the application includes a spelling/pronouncing game that is designed to encourage students with dyslexia to pronounce the letters or words they find difficult.

To play the game, the students are required to pronounce letters or words as they appear on screen. The application then analyzes the student’s response with the help of Kinect’s speech recognition software.

If the students pronounce the prompt correctly, the game shows a monkey climbing a banana tree to collect bananas.

“The application gives points as a reward for success in pronouncing the letter or word, and this is fun,” Risqi said.