LUTA A Collaborative Game Designed for Children With Cognitive Impairments, Using Multiple Tablets to Create a Unified Playing Field

The compulsory schools, focusing mostly on logic, language, and motor skills. However, researchers in the Touch AT! project have noted that children with cognitive impairments to a much bigger extent are struggling with social and emotional skills. The game LuTa was developed in collaboration with Touch AT! with the purpose of encouraging social and emotional activity and uses four connected iPads to create a unified playing field. This thesis describes the development process of a game for children with cognitive impairments, focusing on collaboration and communication. It starts of with a prestudy consisting of interviews and observations leading up to a list of requirements that a game for this user group has to meet. Afterwards follows a description of the development process which in an iterative way researched and tested different solutions. Tests were performed during the development in the game’s intended environment. LuTa ended up being a ball game where the players control the board on which the ball rolls. Each player controls one corner of the playing field, and therefore communication and collaboration is important. After testing the game with the user group some of the design choices made were proven to be problematic. While some of these flaws where fixed in the final product, there are still some flaws left in the game that could be improved to make the game more suitable for the children.