PICOFON Project – Interactive and personalized program to improve Phonological Awareness
2 de August de 2023
Reading skills acquisition is one of the great challenges in the development of children and
it plays a very relevant role both in their academic success and in their future job prospects. Learning to read implies mastery of two fundamental processes. On the one hand, the ability to translate printed words into speech (a process called decoding) and, on the other, the ability to understand what is read (a process known as reading comprehension).
Phonological awareness is a metalinguistic awareness skill that allows you to reflect on and analyze the sounds in words. It is a conscious and explicit ability that allows one to voluntarily understand and manipulate the different ways in which oral language can be divided into sublexical units. That is, it is the ability to identify, isolate, segment, eliminate or replace the components that make up words: syllables, intrasyllabic units and phonemes. In this way, three levels of phonological awareness are generally distinguished:
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- Syllabic awareness: The ability or ability to explicitly manipulate the syllables of words.
- Intrasyllabic awareness: The ability to segment and manipulate the start (consonant/s before the vowel) and the rhyme (the vowel and consonants that are) of the syllables.
- Phonemic awareness: The ability to manipulate the different phonemes of the word.
Different studies have reported that children begin to develop phonological awareness forms between the ages of two and a half and three, and by 4 years of age children can already manipulate the initial words phonemes.
The main purpose of the PICOFON project is the creation of a serious game in the field of education to work on phonological awareness in children from 3 to 7 years old. This project stands out for the implementation of disruptive technologies that represent a significant advance compared to existing programs. These innovations include AI model integration for the recognition of body movements and voice productions, enabling advanced interactivity between the user and the program. In addition, artificial intelligence is used to make autonomous decisions that personalize activities according to the learning level of each user, thus adapting to the individual pace of each child.
Immersium Studio collaborates on this project, creating the illustrations and recording the sound of the instructions. The methodological direction has been led by Llorenç Andreu, professor and researcher, co-leader of the GRECIL group (Research Group on Cognition and Language), as well as Esteban Peñaherrera, who has led the technological direction and developed the project. Both belong to the GRECIL group.
This project is the result of a collaboration between Immersium Studio, GRECIL, Applied Data Science Lab (ADaS Lab), the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), the University of Barcelona and the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu.
