ProbonoWorld: Educating the Mentally Handicapped in a Virtual Environment using Props on a Board

Abstract

ProbonoWorld is a system that allows mentally handicapped persons to safely train real-world situations in a virtual learning environment. Our system is based on the idea of using a prop on a board as an intuitive input device. ProbonoWorld is an expandable virtual world which may include different tasks at several locations and even tasks spanning multiple locations, such as shopping at the supermarket and then preparing a meal at home. To enable navigation through different areas of the world as well as different floors and rooms inside a building we devised four navigation strategies which are controlled by a prop on a single drawing tablet. In collaboration with instructors at a special education school we constructed tasks which teach procedures from everyday life. These tasks focus on navigation through different rooms in combination with a two-dimensional card-sorting game which requires ordering different steps of a familiar task. The subsequent evaluation of our system indicated a wide acceptance by the users and showed promising learning results. Our system differs from existing approaches through the use of intuitive prop-based navigation in a realistic virtual world with a navigation strategy tailored to mentally handicapped people. Our user study indicates that ProbonoWorld is easy to understand and supports learning processes.