Comparative study on emotions analysis from facial expressions in children with and without learning disabilities in virtual learning environment

Children with Learning Disabilities (LDs) show some emotional difficulties and behavioral problems in classroom compared with their peers without LDs. Emotions constitute an important part of the learning process. Recent evidence suggests that the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in special education permits to remove barriers in learning for the target children. Besides, it offers a learning environment for a diversity of emotional experiences. In this present study, we explored the benefits of ICT use to identify the ways in which emotions are involved during the learning process in Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). We conducted a user study with 42 children divided into two groups; experimental group (n=14) and age matched control group (n=28) to compare their emotional experiences in VLE. We used advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to detect children's emotions through their facial expressions by analyzing seven basic facial emotion expressions (angry, disgust, fear, happy, sad, surprise and neutral) while playing an educational game. The initial results indicate that emotions are present in VLE and they appear to suggest that children with LDs experience the same emotions as their peers without LDs in VLE. Besides, they show that children with LDs experience less negative emotions compared to literature evidence about the presence of a higher level of negative emotions in classroom.