Design of Serious Games for Students with Intellectual Disability

We have designed and developed around 10 serious games under the EU Leonardo Transfer of Innovation Project: Game On Extra Time (GOET) project http://goet-project.eu/ . The project supports people with learning disabilities and additional sensory impairments in getting and keeping a job by helping them to learn, via games-based learning; skills that will help them in their working day. These games help students to learn how to prepare themselves for their working life, dealing with every day situations at work, money management, travelling independently etc. In this paper we will address the main games’ design questions and our solutions to these to suit the needs of our target audiences. It is necessary to design the user interfaces for maximum accessibility and usability. In this way we will minimise the additional cognitive load placed on the user while navigating within the software. In order to achieve these goals we have followed published design guidelines, and placed emphasis of using graphics, animations and auditory output to promote user engagement and provide alternatives to text.