90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents. Most do not know sign language or have low levels of proficiency. Unlike hearing children of English-speaking parents or deaf children of signing parents, these children often lack the serendipitous access to language at home which is necessary in developing linguistic skills during the "critical period" of language development. Often these children's only exposure to language is from signing at school. Castle Quest and CopyCat are games that use our sign language recognition system to augment early classroom teaching for developing American Sign Language (ASL) skills in young deaf children.
Copycat was was developed under a grant from the US Department of Education by IMTC in conjuction with the Contextual Computing Group.