My name is Helen Henwood I am currently a 1st year Psychology Student at the University of Leeds. My research project is called "Reading Through Gaming in Primary Schools". I am working on this research with Laidlaw Scholars @Fatima Malik and @Wong Seng Ying Amber, and so far we have made it to week 5 of the project! 

Our project is an extension of research currently being done by Dr Peter Hart and Dr Paula Clarke on "Connecting & Comprehending Through Play", where they have been using games to develop the reading ability of young children. Games can be a great way to motivate children who are not as enthusiastic to read books, or who are less engaged in academic work. However, currently, no scale exists to guide teachers to what games children should be playing at certain stages to ensure the reading difficulty is appropriate. Therefore, the aim of our project is to create a method for grading games, so that teachers and parents will be able to match a student's reading level with an appropriate board game (one where the reading is not so easy that they get bored, but also not so difficult that they lose motivation).

So far in our project, having familiarised ourselves with the Hatcher grading system (used for grading children's books), we have adapted it to develop a preliminary scale for measuring board games against. We have also recently visited a local Primary school to collect data on the reading ability of children when playing a select number of boardgames. We will then be using this data for the next stage of our project - conducting statistical analysis on our scale to determine whether it gives an accurate measure of the reading level required to be able to play a chosen boardgame.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my time working on this project so far, and am so glad to have had Fatima and Amber by my side throughout. Despite some challenging moments and the numerous issues we encountered during the project, the progress we have made in these short 4 weeks has been incredible, and I am excited to continue developing and overcoming hurdles with my amazing team.