IEP Technologies : Expanded Core Curriculum Games for Visually Impaired Students

IEP Objectives

ObjectiveEd.com is our new organization where we are building Expanded Core Curriculum games and interactive simulations for visually impaired students, based on each student’s Individual Educational Plan.
The child’s advancement in acquiring skills in our ECC-based games and interactive simulations will be preserved in a private secure cloud, visible to the school IEP team in a web-based dashboard .
If you are a Special Ed Teacher , click for additional information on trying these types of games as a tool for maximizing student outcomes, relating to their
RTI Intervention .

First Demo

I was excited to show the class the demo of the app so far. I figured they would be amazed at how quickly it all came together, and how their ideas were reflected in a real app. They were underwhelmed.
“It’s boring” was their first comment. So I told them its up to them to figure out how to make it more exciting. We discusesed the idea of incremental development – they come up with ideas to improve each screen, I do it, and we try again and again.
Here’s the original sequence of actions to add a gift:
Search for a toy (such as FURBY):

Look at the results that were found for FURBY, and select one:

Press on the picture for a few seconds, and press SELECT GIFT:

A new screen appears where you can fill out the toy’s name and its description:

When its all set, select who you want to send your wish list to:

The students kept commenting on how boring and not fun it looked, and they thought they needed to redesign all of the navigation menus. Following their design, here’s how the navigation menu looked:

They came up with some alternative designs like this:

But the class voted to keep it the way it was. The FRIENDS menu was similar:

They really liked the right icon. The face with sun-glasses showed whether or not a friend can see your wishlist.
Here’s what they proposed for the app to be less boring: