Yesterday CBBC, the BBC site for children, featured a special series called My Dyslexic Mind on their Newsround blog. The series was directed toward students in an effort to educate them about the learning disability. Newsround also posted a guide to dyslexia for those students who may feel overwhelmed by the disability or for those who don’t fully understand it.
In an effort to help other students walk in the shoes of peers with dyslexia, CBBC created an interactive experience called “Try Being Me.” The game simulates the experiences of having dyslexia. The program shows videos of real students with dyslexia, and then launches into a series of challenging reading and memory puzzles that present useful analogies to the challenges readers with dyslexia face. If you give up on the puzzle, the game reminds you that if you have dyslexia, you can’t give up, no matter how frustrated you are.
“I honestly believe that Try Being Me will be one of the most important pieces of interactive content we will launch on CBBC in 2013,” said CBBC executive producer Japhet Asher in a press release. “We all need a little help sometimes. And help begins with understanding. If Try Being Me succeeds in helping even one of our audience better understand how it feels to be living with dyslexia, and better understand a friend or classmate as a result, then that’s a great start.” Read the full press release here.
CBBC does an excellent job of conveying the challenges students with dyslexia face, and does so with compassion. Features such as CBBC’s, as well as tools such as special type fonts designed to make letter easier to differentiate for students with dyslexia, are effective at helping both students and adults understand the learning disability better.
