IEP Education :  ECC 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 vision impaired students, based on the student’s IEP . 
The child’s progression in mastering skills in these curriculum-based games and interactive simulations are maintained in a private secure cloud, visible to the school IEP team  in a web-based console . 
If you are a Orientation and Mobility specialist , click for more information on learning about these types of games as a tool for maximizing student outcomes, relating to their 
IEP Individual Educational Plan .

How to make it fun

About a year ago, I started getting a lot of requests for a game similar to My Simon.  My Simon is a game where a pattern of both lights and sounds are given, and you press one of four buttons for each sound in the pattern.

For example, My Simon gives you a three note pattern: A, B D, and you repeat the pattern by pressing the button for note A, then note B, then note D.  Then My Simon will add to the pattern, making the four note pattern: A, B, D, C, and you press the button for note A, then B, then D, then C, and so on.
My Simon is basically a memory game, with the pattern getting longer and longer each turn.  Creating the game was simple; the challenge is to figure out how to create a game that doesn’t get boring.
Blindfold Simon starts by telling you the gestures to perform, and then rewards you by playing fun sounds.  For example, the game will say “up, up, down”, and you must swipe up twice, and down once.
Variety is critical in keeping a game interesting; in Blindfold Simon, you can select from  musical instrument sounds, animal sounds, animal names, or short musical phrases.  That makes the game fun for both kids and adults, and offers some variety.
The next step is to make each level slightly harder than the prior level.  As you move from level to level, you need to use more gestures.  The game starts out with two gestures: swipe up and swipe down.  By level 8, there are six gestures: swiping in the four directions, and tapping once or twice.
To raise the complexity up another notch, there are 3 modes of game.  In the very simplest traditional mode, each new game, and each level in the game, uses the same pattern.  In the standard traditional mode, each new game starts with a different pattern, and each level extends that pattern by one gesture.  In the harder mode, each new game starts with a different pattern, and each level uses a different pattern.
Wacky mode in Blindfold Simon raise the complexity even higher.  Instead of telling you what gestures to perform, you must listen the the sounds, and determine the gestures.  If swipe up is a cow moo-ing, and swipe down is a dog barking, when you hear bark, bark, moo, you must swipe down twice and up once.
Scoring the game also makes the game challenging, since the longer the pattern is, the more points you get.  For example, if you complete a 3 gesture pattern, you get 3 points.  If you complete a 4 gesture pattern, you get 4 points.  By the time the time you’ve completed a  6 gesture pattern, you’ve earned 3 + 4 + 5 + 6, or 18 points.