We developed a support system for pronunciation teaching and practice in special education classes for language-disabled children. It allows exercises to be individually tailored to each child’s pronunciation needs. Three speech evaluation methods were prepared for each type of presented words: automatic speech recognition, phonemic discrimination between the correct and the probable error pronunciation of a consonant period, and articulation tests from speech-language-hearing therapists. For about 3 or 4 months, we performed practical field tests with nine students in special education classes in four elementary schools. All of the teachers believed that our system helped improve their students’ pronunciation, and the speech-language-hearing therapist felt that it simplified observation of the improvement process of the students’ pronunciation.

We created a Web application system for pronunciation instruction and practice support in special education classes for language-disabled children. We developed our system for practical use by solving problems revealed during our previous study. We introduced a new consonant distinction method, which led to improvement in distinction performance. We simplified access to the students’ speech and exercise records for speech and language therapists (STs) by extending our previous system into a Web application. In this system, users are assigned one of the following authorizations: student, teacher, ST, or speech evaluator. The teachers, STs, and speech evaluators are grouped by the student to whom they are linked and can access exercise records and student speech sounds over the Internet. The results of our practical field test indicate that our system promotes the cooperation of teachers and STs for more effective instruction.

The playing drum requires rhythmic senses and physical technics. It is difficult for novice drummers to determine their practice result. We developed drum training system to solve this problem. This system captures drumming motion of a user using Kinect, and compares the user’s motion and instructional motion. This system supports the users to determine their practice result objectively in self-learning without a teacher. In this paper, we describe our approach, the system implementation and a discussion of our system in the practical uses.

It is quite simple for most residents to understand the knowledge of disaster prevention. However, people sometimes fail to apply such knowledge to take appropriate action, which is often referred to as knowledge-to-action gap. We advocate it is important for learners to have simulated experiences of dangerous situations as results of their intentional unsafe evacuation behaviors to resolve the gap. Because unsafe evacuation behaviors are likely to be taken as attempts to achieve an objective other than the ones with higher priority to ensure their own safety. In this study, we propose a learning support method to induce unsafe evacuation behaviors by exposing an objective to be achieved other than the primary safety. Evaluation of the developed prototype based on this method shows that our proposed method makes learners experience simulated dangerous situations through unsafe evacuation behavior, and experiencing a simulated hazard facilitated forming the intention of safe evacuation behavior.