Woman invents game to help special needs children communicate

Celmira is a teacher who works with special needs students who suffer from autism, dyslexia, Down Syndrome, blindness and hearing disorders.

That led her to invent EKUI. This game consists of a card deck that gather for communication methods: Braille, sign language, spelling and international phonetic alphabet.

Just imagine how you learned to read, write and speak, and now let's bring that to this deck of cards. We learned to speak by watching the phonemes that came out of our parents' mouth, so we went to get the phonetic alphabet. We also learned a lot about memorising and iconic reading of society. So we went to find a visual clue to help understand the spelling of the alphabet, using the Portuguese sign language. We wanted this deck to be inclusive, so we went to get Braille. It has visual braille and tactile braille too, to include people with some kind of visual impairment,” the innovator explained.

This project, developed within the Associação Leque, is the only of its kind in Portugal.

The game has been used by over two thousand children in more than 133 schools all over the country.

EKUI was awarded the social responsibility prize Maria José Nogueira Pinto, which allowed the team to launch a mobile app version of the game. This communication methodology is also available through digital tutorials and the team provides workshops.

According to project leaders, EKUI has a success rate of 89%.

Adapted from: https://bit.ly/2qrHPu9

More info: https://ekui.pt/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDLI3IphOUA