GIOCOSO - Paediatric Games for Communication and Socialisation

Subject: Technologies for Welfare and Inclusion

The Giocoso project, designed for pre-school children and their families, aims at creating and testing technologically advanced tools to promote, to improve and to strengthen children's socialising and communication skills. Smart spaces and apps that are specially designed for children will be developed using ICT technologies. They will provide customised stimuli for the individual needs of all children, according to their characteristics and the way they relate with the world around them, how they create interpretation codes, their strengths and their weaknesses in terms of learning, emotions and relationships. The needs of children with disabilities will be taken into account.

Children will interact naturally with the elements present in the spaces, thanks to sensors and devices that are fully integrated into the environment. This will allow children to develop their potential, their ability to understand and to modify elements in the world around them and to become familiar with the new digital characteristics of the society in which they are the new citizens. Giocoso will also promote constant contact between families and project workers at home through the creation and animation of communities, which will allow families to interact with the reference context (nursery in this case) and with each other. A positively-oriented virtual social environment, side to side with real life, will be created in this way.

Giocoso will provide all children and their families with tools that help strengthen their growth process, offering tools that improve social and cultural integration and communication. By collecting behavioural data, it will provide the kind of stimuli and encouragement that can prevent learning difficulties arising later in childhood, according to specific individual needs.