Video games development as an opportunity for social impact

Abstract

The need for a more inclusive society for persons with disabilities is increasing every day, as governments are required to create the appropriate legal framework for improving environments such as public and private spaces, as long as educational and work environments. The progress has been slow, and there are still many areas where integration has been nonexistent. In Colombia, the government has improved several areas, but there are many needs for people with disabilities in education, who are usually left behind. We propose here a program for building inclusive mobile applications for children and adults with disabilities. The developers of those games will be high school students from schools in Barranquilla, and using this approach will teach them about inclusion. The users of those applications will be the children and adults with special needs served by institutions for students with special needs. In this paper, we present the methodology, software, and hardware architecture design and preliminary evidence of the positive effect that this kind of project can have on undergraduate students.