IEP Technologies :  Expanded Core Curriculum Games for Visually Impaired Students

IEP Objectives

ObjectiveEd.com is our new company where we are building Expanded Core Curriculum interactive simulations for blind and low vision students, based on a student’s IEP . 
The child’s advancement in learning skills in our curriculum-based games are stored in a private secure cloud, visible to the school IEP team  in a web-based console . 
If you are a O&M , click for more information on trying these types of games as part of maximizing student outcomes, relating to their 
IEP Goals .

Basketball: Drawing on the screen

In my prior post, I talked about how you could draw on the screen to select a type of basketball shot, such as a dunk shot, or a hook shot or a jump shot.  I thought this would be more interesting than simply flipping through a menu of shots, and while some testers wanted the menu, most wanted to draw the gesture.

As usual, I learned that I was making some false assumptions about drawing on the screen.  In my initial version, a hook shot looked like the letter V, and a jump shot looked like the letter J.  In both gestures, you swipe your finger down to the right, and then up again to the right.  The difference is that both the downstroke and the upstroke in the letter V are almost identical in length, while in the letter J, the downstroke is short and the upstroke is long.
Many of the testers told me the game didn’t detect their hook shot or jump shot correctly.  The app assumed that if the downstroke with less than 1/3 of the length of the upstroke, it was the letter J instead of the letter V.  When I finally discovered what was going on, I realized that without looking at the screen, it’s hard to measure the length of your strokes.  Some of the testers had no problem, but enough did that I had to change it.
In the next version, I changed the gestures to always use the letter V shape for both jump and hook, but you start from the left for a hook shot, drawing the down and up strokes to the right, and you start from the right for a jump shot, drawing the down and up strokes to the left.
I did similar changes for the dunk shot, free throw and post shots.  Everyone said the game was much easier to use.