IEP Plan :  Expanded Core Curriculum Games for Visually Impaired Students

IEP Objectives

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

We’re building another app!

We started the app club again this January, and some new 5th and 6th graders joined. This time they want to build a game app.
We spent the first three meetings (once a week) talking about what game to build. I thought this was a good opportunity to teach the kids how to design a game, and would give me an excuse to learn how to program in one of the game development tools, such as Corona or Unify.
Unfortunately, every game they suggested looked like a thousand other games already in the App Store. One girl wanted to build “Muffin Puppies” – a look-alike game to “Break Kittens”:

There are so many games in the App Store, it just doesn’t make sense to build a game similar to an existing game. Building a quality app takes months, and the only way to make an app popular is for the app to stand out. I told the students we need to come up with something that’s never been done before.
Unfortunately, most students can’t “think out of the box” when it comes to designing a game. They seem to have more creativity in building an app that meets a need they have, or solves a problem they often encounter (i.e. WishToList).
I gave them these criteria for a game app: (1) It must be reasonably unique, (2) it must not require a lot of graphics (so we don’t have to find a graphic artist to work for free), (3) it must use the iPhone or iPad in an unusual manner.
Let’s see if they come up with something.