Abstract
Learning to write is a demanding endeavour that requires a combination of linguistic, motor and cognitive skills. Some children suffer from delay or inability to acquire those skills, which often hampers their performance at school and brings about serious consequences for self-esteem, personal expectations and social relationships. The situation worsens in developing countries, due to the lack of resources and specialised personnel. With this background, this paper describes an experiment with a newly-developed sensorised pencil with triangular prism shape, which is shown to yield substantial improvements in children with/without special education needs. A team of experts in the areas of speech therapy, occupational therapy, educational psychology, physiotherapy and pedagogy have expressed very positive opinions about the sensorised pencil and the accompanying software for the acquisition and analysis of quantitative data about handwriting. Furthermore, the device stands out for its low cost in comparison with similar developments, which is a key factor to aid children from low-income families. This fact is explained with a success story of manufacturing and delivering sensorised pencils in the Ecuadorian province of Azuay, framed in a multi-layer sustainable development perspective based on collaboration of several institutions and individuals.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 10682 |
Pages (from-to) | 1-15 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Sustainability (Switzerland) |
Volume | 12 |
Issue number | 24 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2 Dec 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors from the University of Vigo got support from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Galician Regional Government under agreement for funding the atlanTTic Research Center for Telecommunication Technologies, as well as the Ministerio de Educaci?n y Ciencia (Gobierno de Espa?a) research project TIN2017-87604-R. The authors from the Universidad Polit?cnica Salesiana got support from the European programme to support education, training, youth and sport in Europe (ERASMUS+)-research project 609785-EPP-1-2019-1-ES-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
Keywords
- Handwriting development
- Sensorised pencils
- Special education needs
- Sustainable technology development
- Third-grade and fourth-grade children