Character Alive

Abstract

This paper presents Character Alive, a tangible system designed to improve early Chinese literacy acquisition for Mandarin-speaking children at-risk for dyslexia by enabling high-level interaction. Character Alive uses the multisensory training method to teach children the reading and writing of Chinese characters and words. The core design features of our system are augmented dynamic color cues, 2D radical cards and handwriting cards with tactile cues, and multimedia content such as character animations. Character Alive was built on our previous work on designing tangible and augmented reality reading and writing systems for children at-risk for dyslexia in English. Our previous work has demonstrated that dynamic color cues can draw children's attention to key characteristics of letter-sound-correspondences and two-hand actions with tangible letters help children to better solve spelling tasks. We present the design rationale, the design and implementation of the Character Alive system, and the future plan on evaluating the system.