Mehida is a multimedia system offering hearing-impaired children an easy and attractive method to communicate with their hearing and deaf peers. It is a total communication method whose objective is the acquisition of various forms of communication available to the hearing impaired simultaneously: sign language, speech, fingerspelling, lip reading, reading and writing. Didactic activities and games are used to teach the different means of communication. This approach gives the child the chance to practice the different types of communication. A character has been created in the shape of a pear to assist and guide the child. The pupil identifies with the character at all times, as it explains what the child is being asked to do during each activity. The Mehida learning process is divided into five stages: basic learning, prereading and prewriting, syllable, word, and sentence reading and writing. Each phase establishes a hierarchy of didactic objectives which are the expression of the skills and knowledge to be acquired by the child during the learning process (e.g., Learning concepts of similarity), broken down into a series of lower level operational objectives (e.g., Select figures of the same shape, size and colour).

Contact Alonso at the Facultad de Inform?tica - Universidad Polit?cnica de Madrid, Campus de Montegancedo, 28660 - Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, e-mail falonso@fi.upm.es.