Avatar-based Sign Language Training Interface for Primary School Education

The aim of this study is to present usable educational tools of students with special needs. Hearing impaired students cannot use text and speech based technological, educational material that is becoming a crucial tool for modern education. Like videos of signers, a signing avatar for TİD (Turkish Sign Language) would allow communicating information in the form of visual gestures, thus becoming usable when the use of text is unfeasible. However, compared to videos, animated avatars offer several advantages like easy reproducible of gesture sequences, control of point of view, adjusting the speed of the sign and being smaller in storage and bandwidth then videos. For this study, a signing avatar was developed to represent a portion of the social sciences course for Turkish primary education curriculum. To analyze the success and effectiveness of the interface, the performance of the text, and avatar-based interaction in a humancomputer interaction scheme using elementary school students have been compared. The results demonstrate that avatar based tutoring was more effective in assessing the child’s knowledge of certain sign language words. Since the aim was to make the signing avatar as comprehensible as possible, the results demonstrate that goal have been.