The Moovy project, born from the collaboration between i3Lab (Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering – Politecnico di Milano) and the University of Milan-Bicocca (BiL – Bicocca Language Group and MiBTec – Mind and Behaviour Technological Center), is among the finalists of the 2022 edition of Startcup Lombardia, the competition promoted by Regione Lombardia to foster research and technological innovation and encourage the birth and development of new companies with high business potential, in the Life Science & MedTech category.
Moovy is a real board game consisting of a dashboard, an interactive board, 36 tagged cards and an app for phone and tablet. All completed by a box and binders for stimuli. To play, you need to place the board and the stimuli on the dashboard and start the game using the app. Through play, Moovy helps children learn sentences, morphosyntactic constructs and much more.
Moovy has been designed for children aged 4 to 13 and young adults with speech impairments and cognitive difficulties. The game allows them to work on some morphosyntactic structures such as clitic pronouns and passive sentences. In fact, these constructions present an argumentative movement, i.e. the movement of an argument of the verb towards the left periphery of the sentence. The idea on which this project is based is to transpose the “argumentative movement”, which is mental in its nature, into a motor action that takes place in front of the child’s eyes through a physical movement in which he is actively involved.
Thanks to a multidisciplinary team with a diverse background, spanning psychology, linguistics, speech therapy, computer engineering and design, Moovy's approach puts users at the center of the project and technology at the service of their needs. Researchers and PhD students work closely with therapists, children and families to create a tool that can be easily used by everyone.
The Moovy project is developed in partnership with Centro Ricerca e Cura Balbuzie (CRC), Rome; Cooperativa Imparole – Centro per l’Infanzia e la Famiglia, Milan; Cooperativa Sociale Fraternità e Amicizia ONLUS, Milan; Cooperativa Sociale Atelier dei Pensieri ONLUS, Milan.