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Project ZINnig wins RAAK Award 2020
Project ZINnig (Project senTENCEsible in good English!) has won the prestigious SIA RAAK Award 2020!
SIA RAAK is the Taskforce for Applied Research. The mandate of SIA RAAK is to improve the quality and widen the impact of the applied research done by Universities of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. They do this by funding research and facilitating collaboration between Universities of Applied Sciences, industry and public bodies (https://regieorgaan-sia.nl/taskforce-applied-research-sia/ ).
Project ZINnig (https://husite.nl/zinnig/) was developed and executed by Rob Zwitserlood, Inge Klatte, Eva van Heugten, and Ellen Gerrits, all members from Research Group Speech and Language Therapy at HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht; researchers from Research Group Digital Smart Services at HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht; together with 10 SLT private practices; Auris; the Dutch Association for Speech and Language Therapists; Utrecht University; Hanze University of Applied Sciences Groningen; gaming experts company Game Tailors; and children with DLD.
The goal of our project was to develop cutting-edge tools for SLTs working with children with DLD aged 7-10 years old with complex grammatical problems. The children have problems building complex sentences and also make many morphosyntactic errors. SLTs expressed that they would like to have more resources for diagnostics and treatment of the complex grammatical problems in this age group. In our two-year project we developed a prototype for a web-based Language Sample Analysis (LSA) application ‘SponTaal’; a manual for LSA with video clips; and a serious game ‘WaanZINnig’ for children with DLD helping them to learn building sentences in an explicit but playful way. The children chose the theme of the game: clean-up the polluted world, and they also selected some of the graphics favored by them.
The SIA RAAK Award 2020 Jury was impressed by how far and concrete we managed to develop our tools; the usability studies we performed with both the app and the serious game; the broad composition of participating researchers and professionals; the number of students involved from different bachelor education programmes; the number of SLTs working in private practices and special education; and especially the participation of children with DLD.
We are very proud to win this award, and hope to develop the tools further in the near future, so that they will become available for the SLTs and children with DLD.
Last modified: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 11:40:14 GMT