Technology Tuesday

A little more than a month ago, we let you know that students of Sri Kurniawan, Associate Professor at the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), are collaborating with Imagine! by having some of her students help to create apps for Imagine! clients as part of a student project.

This is Imagine!’s second app development project with UCSC. Go Banana Slugs!!

Today, we’d like to share some specifics about this semester’s projects. This year we will be working with two teams to develop five HTML5 applications for people with cognitive disabilities. The general purpose of these applications is to provide access to, and teach basic educational/communication skills to, adults with disabilities in a way that is age appropriate and customizable to the interests of the individual. One of the goals of this project is to develop a database for each game to track the progress of the user over time. The apps will be developed to incorporate an errorless learning approach (meaning, users will always select the correct answers before moving on to the next question). Each application with have two different modes of operation, a teaching mode and a testing mode. The teaching mode is a practice mode where the user gets to play freely but is still within the errorless teaching approach. The testing mode is password protected and needs to be facilitated by an administrator. This mode records the user's results which can be stored, and then accessed and compared for data analysis at a later time.

This year we are working on a "concept" game, a basic sign language game, a "Simon" game for the visually impaired, and a basic object identification game.

In the "concept" game, users will be tested on their knowledge of which is amount is bigger, which is smaller, longer, shorter, fuller, emptier, etc.

The basic sign game will incorporate videos of basic sign language and asked the user to identify the correct photo/icon equivalent.

The object identification game will teach and test users on their environmental knowledge.

The Simon game will allow folks with visual and cognitive impairments to play games independently.

Imagine! is very grateful to the University of California, Santa Cruz for all of their work on these projects and for the development partnership to create solutions for the cognitively disabled. We’ll be sure to keep you posted on the progress!