Using Connected Learning Design Principles to Further Co-Create a Critical Speech Therapy Game

Therapy can be costly, time consuming, repetitive, and difficult. Games have the power to teach transferable skills, can turn repetitive tasks into engaging mechanics, have been proven to be effective at delivering various forms of therapy, and can be deployed at large scales. Therapy games represent fertile ground for connected learning. In this work, we collaborate with 7 children with corrected cleft palate aged 2–10 and their parents during their yearly visit to UC Davis Medical center to co-create and evaluate SpokeIt, a speech
therapy game. Each of these children comes from low socioeconomic statuses with limited access to speech
therapy and would benefit from the amplified opportunities of new media in connected learning. Throughout
the study, we ran multiple cascading participatory design sessions using design principles of connected learning, which culminated in the design of 2 new medium-fidelity prototypes presented in this paper.