Key Characteristics of Digital Educational Games for Students With Intellectual Disabilities

Introduction

Intellectual disability is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by a deficit in an individual’s intellectual and adaptive functioning present during childhood (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). It affects all fields of early development, including cognitive, motor, auditory, language, and socio-emotional development, and leads to difficulties in conceptual reasoning, social and practical functioning (Maulik, Mascarenhas, Mathers, Dua, & Saxena, 2011; Vuijk, Hartman, Scherder, & Visscher, 2010). Although all students with intellectual disabilities have difficulties in those domains, there are numerous differences in abilities and achievements which are always conditioned by the biological basis, but also by the influences from the environment and the quality of support and incentives in early development. Thus, individual differences in abilities differ across cognitive abilities measured by IQ tests (from 0 to 70(5)), language abilities (from verbal to nonverbal), motoric abilities (from independent motoric functioning to dependent), and socio-emotional abilities (from high to low level of well-being).

This paper focuses on students with mild and moderate intellectual disabilities or mild intellectual disabilities with comorbidities. The education process of those students operates between student's abilities and needs and society (Biesta, 2014), and curriculum is a bridge between them. The author (Moljord, 2018) pointed out that the educational content is crucial to equip those students with needed skills, while curriculum research for this learner group is sparse. In special school settings, students are educated by adopted curriculum or curriculum for developing life skills. Curriculum content and subject matter (what is taught) are normative and prescriptive (Deng & Luke, 2008), although often argued in the context of the importance of academic versus functional life skills orientated curriculum (Alwell & Cobb, 2009; Shurr & Bouck, 2013). An appropriate curriculum is fundamental for developing cognitive, social, and functional skills of students with mild or moderate intellectual disabilities for future participation and, as much as possible independent living, in society. The curriculum should be aligned with the conceptual, social, and practical abilities and functioning of those students and their motivation and independence skills allowing the development of problem-solving skills, language development, use of concepts such as money or time, communicational (inter and intrapersonal) skills, socio-emotional development as well as judgment, and practical adaptive skills such as independence, self-care, activities of daily living, occupation (Maulik, Mascarenhas, Mathers, Dua, & Saxena, 2011).

For this reason, an individual approach to learning is very important for students with intellectual disabilities. Teaching based on games enables that certain educational content can be introduced to students in a suitable and to them understandable way. The specificity of the education of students with intellectual disabilities is that the focus is on the adaptive skills of students that are necessary for everyday life, and the GDTL (Game-Design Teaching and Learning) approach can help to meet these specificities. This approach, introduced by the author Gee (Gee & Price, 2021), states that it is not only important to use games in the classroom, but to use deep game-based principles of teaching and learning across the curriculum.