IEP Education :  Expanded Core Curriculum Games for Visually Impaired Students

IEP Process

ObjectiveEd.com is our new organization where we are building ECC interactive simulations for blind students, based on the child’s Individual Educational Plan. 
The child’s advancement in learning skills in these education-based games and interactive simulations will be preserved in a private secure cloud, available to the school IEP team  in a web-based console . 
If you are a Special Ed Director , press for additional information on trying these types of games as part of maximizing student outcomes, relating to their 
web IEP .

Jumping from lily pad to lily pad

If you read my earlier post about Blindfold Hopper, you might remember we were trying to build a game similar to the video game Frogger.  We tested several variants amongst the gamers, and they prefer a first-person game instead of a third person game.  In a first person game, you are the center of the action.  As you move, the world moves around you.  In a third person game, like most video games such as Angry Birds, PacMac, or Flappy Bird, you watch the action through the window of your phone, and you are an observer.

Now that we picked first person as the game perspective, we set the game up where you are a frog, and you are sitting on your lily pad.  You hear the sound of a river rushing by in the background, and your lily pad makes a sound.  You can move your lily pad back and forth on the river by swinging your arm left and right.  The sound of your lily pad is a short music loop, and the sound of another lily pad that you must jump to is a different musical loop, similar to these:


The other lily pad is moving; either from left to right, or right to left.   When your lily pad music loop is aligned with the other lily pad’s music loop, you tap the screen to jump to that lily pad.  If you miss the other lily pad, or the other lily pad moves off of the screen, you lose and you splash into the water.
During testing we found there’s no need to give sound to your lily pad – it’s sound is always in the center of your head, as you are sitting on that lily pad.  The trick to successful jumping is to move your arm left or right until the other lily pad’s sound is in the center of your head, and then tap the screen.
Each lily pad moves faster than the prior one, so the challenge is to get better and better at centering on the target lily pad and jumping quickly.  If you stand still for a second or two, an alligator sneaks up on you, and eats you.
We launched this first version to determine how popular a game like this would be, before we starting enhancing it.  People seemed to really like it, because they asked us to enhance it with more levels, more power-ups, more prizes, and more danger.