Playful learning with sound‐augmented toys: comparing children with and without visual impairment.

Sound‐augmented toys producing factual knowledge were thought to encourage incidental, playful learning in children with visual impairments (VIs). A group of 15 children with VIs and 22 sighted controls played with a sound‐augmented savannah landscape and listened to an informative story in a counterbalanced order. Children's knowledge about savannah animals was assessed at baseline and after each condition in order to quantitatively compare knowledge gains between conditions. Results indicated that children with VIs gained more knowledge than sighted controls from playing with the sound‐augmented toy. Furthermore, offering both the augmented toy and the informative story led to higher knowledge gains than a single medium, especially in children with VIs. Sound‐augmented toys could therefore be a useful addition to the current curriculum in special education for children with VIs. Lay Description: What is already known about this topic: Game‐based learning is becoming more popular as educational context.Children with visual impairments are often unable to benefit from a predominantly visual learning context.Augmented environments encourage exploratory learning by enhancing physical materials with technology.Sound‐augmented toys might encourage playful learning in children with visual impairments. What this paper adds: This empirical study compared an innovative sound‐augmented toy with traditional verbal instruction.Both children with visual impairments and a sighted comparison group participated.The targeted learning outcome was factual knowledge about animals.Children gained comparable knowledge from the augmented environment as from verbal instruction.The augmented toy was a more effective learning context for children with visual impairments than in sighted children. Implications for practice and/or policy: Sound‐augmented environments encourage object interaction and playful learning in children with visual impairments.Sound‐augmented toys can be a useful addition to the current curriculum of children with visual impairments in special education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]