Children's views

Nine children were observed and interviewed by research assistants using the Fun Tool Kit (Read, 2008) which asks children which aspects of the game they want to play again, asks the children to sort cards from the different game aspects to indicate which they think worked best and worst, and to give an overall indication of how much they liked the game.

• All children appeared to enjoy the sessions bar two children. In both cases the teaching assistants said the child were not having a good day.
• Children rated the majority of the activities within E-PLAYS as something that they would like to do again.
• Most children enjoyed the more complicated game features (ghost house, going out onto the roof of the houses, secret tunnel).

Teaching Assistants' views

The manual was generally well-received, with teaching assistants commenting particularly favourably on the illustrations used. Most felt confident and found it easy to set up. Focus groups showed children and teaching assistants were generally very enthusiastic about the game and enjoyed it.

Most children enjoyed the more complicated game features (ghost house, going out onto the roof of the houses, secret tunnel). Teaching assistants felt the more difficult features were introduced too late on.

The general conclusion is that we under-estimated what children and teaching assistants can cope with and what they want in terms of complexity of the game features. Teaching assistants were generally very positive about involvement of a classmate and that both the partners and the focal children enjoyed it.

• All schools understood E-PLAYS instructions sufficiently well to use it.
• Children appeared to learn the basics of the game readily and remembered how to play from previous sessions suggesting that we had gauged the level of difficulty for this group of children correctly.
• Many of our schools asked to continue using E-PLAYS at the end of the study.

the manual was easy to follow because of the diagrams and step by step guide

the game worked, so I was looking forward to getting started

I think the children are more relaxed with peers than with adults

Speech and Language Therapists' views

Speech and language therapists received a brief questionnaire after training by the research team to gauge their initial understanding and confidence regarding E-PLAYS.

• The manual was favourably regarded.
• Speech and language therapists commented on the manuals clarity and the pictorial style used was appreciated.
• Speech and language therapists also felt that the manual would be useful for training the teaching assistants.

the manual couldn't be clearer to follow

the session by session breakdown is very helpful

leaving the manual with teaching assistants means they won't forget anything covered in the training