Early signs of dyslexia among children can now be detected through computer games. Caitie Glover, 12, ,drawing from her experiences , invented the system which she believes could be used by children at primary school level in order to detect early signs of dyslexia that affects one out of ten persons. Now the schoolgirl's idea has earned the backing of a prominent charity and businesspersons.
Caitie Glover's dyslexia was detected when she reached secondary school, though she and the rest of her family had supposed even before her diagnosis that she had difficult times with words. Drawing from her struggle, Caitie invented a computer game system which can screen children for early signs of dyslexia. She believes the computer games can be used by elementary school children in order to detect early marks of dyslexia.
"Most current tools they use to identify dyslexia are for kids over the age of seven or eight. By this time they have fallen a long way behind their classmates, have lost a lot of confidence and often feel very miserable.," The Times quoted Caitie as saying. She added that she wanted children to think like "I'm going to play a game with my favorite character using this cool technology."
The computer games can be played with headsets. It would ask kids to match sound recordings to written words. Caitie said dyslexic children would have a different experience if they learn words in a fun and colorful way. For example in her developed games, she made the words in colorful 3D letters and created exercises in a very fun game.
Aside from her experience, the schoolgirl had drawn some of her ideas from some researches. One of the researchers she had looked into was the one that suggested that the eye movements of people with dyslexia might be different than those people without dyslexia. Another research was one recommending that headsets which include eye-tracking tech can one day be utilized to screen people for dyslexia.
Today, Caitie's company, Syper, had already gained support from several entrepreneurs telling they would like to help or invest. Even Stephen Hall from charity Dyslexia Action said they were very impressed with the innovation of Caitie as well as her passion for helping kids with dyslexia.
Dyslexia is a language-based learning disorder which includes poor word decoding, oral reading fluency and spelling and word reading; the Austin Learning Solutions has learned. In the United States, 20 percent of school-aged children are dyslexic, the report added.
