Every pediatric speech therapist has a game collection. That's the rule.
If it's not a physical game collection, it's a digital collection; and if it's not digital, then it's a mental collection. Oftentimes, we carry a mix of all three.
What's the connection between speech therapy and games?
The simple answer: kids learn best through play. Play allows longer, happier learning, and often times, better cooperation and quicker progress. More importantly, in speech therapy, the learning transfers much more quickly to real life with play, because for kids, play is life.
Do I use play all the time? No, not always. Sometimes I'm doing some other every day activity, and sometimes we work in moments of absolute focus on a skill. But as soon as I've established a skill with a client (even if it requires help to do), I'm immediately moving on to practising the skill while playing or doing some sort of every day activity. The activity could be reading, making a craft, making a snack, playing a card game. The reason for this is that I wish to avoid the "clinic effect" where the child does their best speech in a clinical setting and it doesn't transfer well outside of clinic (like at home or out and about their community). The chances of successful skill transfer happen if we are learning the skills in a natural activity. Play is natural and keeps learning positive and believe it or not, that's an important ingredient for productivity and progress.
The challenge for educators and clinicians to make game-based learning work is the extra work it takes. Game-based learning requires either 1. extra time to identify a game that meets your clinical goals and that the child/teen will like and preparation to integrate the game into the session, or 2. very good quick improv skills to quickly find opportunities on the fly to target skill if you don't have extra time.
I am working on a few things to help clinicians, teachers and parents cut down on the extra effort to make game-based learning.
1. A resource of games that they can use to hit speech, language and cognitive goals.
2. Developing a puzzle game that requires decoding, blending, segmenting, manipulation like substituting/inserting/deleting phonemes. We hope that this game can be a model for how games made for entertainment can sell to other markets.
3. A cross-industry game jam in 2026 that increases the potential for game-based learning in table top games and video games. I hope that this sort of game jam can become more popular and repeated in other cities.