Development of a Serious Game for British Sign Language Education

The document presents HangHand, a mobile-friendly, two-dimensional serious game built in Unity 6 that adapts the Hangman format to teach basic British Sign Language (BSL) fingerspelling and colour vocabulary. Motivated by the scarcity of BSL learning resources and the exclusion of Deaf communities from many educational tools, the work positions the game as a complement to, rather than a substitute for, Deaf-led BSL instruction. A preliminary scoping review of virtual reality serious games for sign language underpins the design: it found that most existing applications teach static or dynamic gestures in isolation, a gap HangHand addresses by combining both within one experience.

The game embeds assessment directly into play and maps it to three learning outcomes: letter familiarity, spelling and word recognition, and foundational skills developed through repetition. Three difficulty modes and a win-streak mechanic are used to sustain motivation, and visual BSL references support the experiential learning model that guides the design. The evaluation strategy is primarily formative, drawing on pre- and post-questionnaires, observation of gameplay, and a small workshop with real users.

The authors are explicit about the limits of the work. The prototype uses Scottish regional signs only, the evaluation is small in scale, and the design is still at an early stage. The preliminary review and development plan do not themselves report empirical evidence of learning effectiveness, so claims about educational impact remain to be established through the proposed evaluation. The surrounding literature on serious games for health and on evaluating serious game learning outcomes informs the methodological framing, though the document's central contribution is a design proposal and prototype rather than a validated intervention.