IEP Objectives :  Expanded Core Curriculum Games for Visually Impaired Students

IEP Objectives

ObjectiveEd.com is our new organization where we are building ECC interactive simulations for visually impaired students, based on a child’s Individual Educational Plan. 
The child’s progress in learning skills in our education-based games will be maintained in a private secure cloud, accessible to the school team in a web-based dashboard . 
If you are a Special Ed Director , click for more details on learning about these types of games as part of maximizing student outcomes, relating to their 
Individual Educational Plan .

Games in the Barn

Last year, I was watching my daughter play the iPhone game “Goat Evolution” while we were on vacation, and thought a variant that would be a fun audio game.  The idea of Goat Evolution game is to drag two similar goats together, and that produces a newly evolved goat that was worth more points.  You repeat the process with the more powerful goats, until you create the ultimate goat.

The basis for the audio equivalent would be where you use finger to explore the screen to find the first goat, then use another finger to find a second goat, and then drag the two goats together.  As you explore, when you  first finger passes over a goat, you would hear the goat, and the goat would then follow that finger; the gestures would be the same for the second goat.
I prototyped this game, and found that locating goats was extremely difficult, and dragging them towards each other almost impossible.  Not only was the game hard to play when I was looking at the screen, getting the app to switch quickly between one finger and two finger dragging is unreliable on the iPhone.
I modified the game to use just one finger, and instead of combining with another animal, the goal of the game was to drag the animal to the edge of the screen.  That turned the game into Blindfold Barnyard: drag barnyard animals to the north, south, east or west fences.
To earn points, once you have a bunch of similar animals at a fence, swipe with 2 fingers to move those animals into the barn.  The more animals that are hitched and moved, the higher you score.  For one animal, one point.  Two animals, three points.  Three animals, six points, and so on.  But if you attempt to hitch a different animal to the fence, all of the animals run away from the fence.  New animals appear in the barnyard every few seconds.
The testers really liked the game, but had trouble finding animals.  I added two methods to locate the animals: compass and clock directions.  With compass directions, the game tells you where the nearest animal is, such as “Horse to the north east”.  With clock directions, the game tells you “Sheep at 3 o’clock”.
I’ve been told some people are scoring as high as 2,000 points in the 3 minute game, and the instructions are quite funny.
You can get this game at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blindfold-barnyard/id1069200628?mt=8