IEP Goals :  Expanded Core Curriculum Games for Visually Impaired Students

IEP Technologies

ObjectiveEd.com is our new company where we are building ECC games for visually impaired students, based on the student’s Individual Educational Plan. 
The student’s advancement in acquiring skills in our education-based games and interactive simulations will be maintained in a private secure cloud, available to the IEP team in a web-based dashboard . 
If you are a O&M , click for additional details on learning about these types of games as a tool for maximizing student outcomes, relating to their 
IEP Individual Educational Plan .

Word Search

Most people played word search puzzles when they were young; in a square grid of random letters, you have to find words.  For example, in the following, you have to find the words DOG, CAT and MICE:

B E C D M R
U D O G I A
C A T S C E
T A O G E B

The word “DOG” is found in the second line, starting at the second letter.  The word “CAT” is found in the third line, starting at the first letter.  The word “MICE” starts at the fourth letter of the first line, and reads down for 4 lines.
I was asked to create a Blindfold Word Search game of varying complexity, allowing people of all ages and skills to solve the puzzle.
The simplest variant of a word search puzzle is to only hide words from left to right, since people normally read from left to right.  The words “CAT” and “DOG” are hidden in the above puzzle that way.  A little more complex is to hide words left to right, and right to left, like the word “GOAT” in the bottom line.
Once you get good at that, the game gets more complex by including words that are hidden vertically as well as horizontally.  The word “MICE” is hidden top to bottom in the fifth column, and the word “BEAR” is hidden bottom to top in the last column.
In all of the examples so far, letters were only used in one word.  To make the game a little more difficult, some words can share letters.  For example, the letter “C” is used twice: once for the word “CUB” in the first column, reading up, and the word “CAT” mentioned before.
The highest difficulty is where words can run diagonally, from the lower left to the upper right, or from the upper right to the lower left, or from the lower right to the upper left, or from the upper left to the lower right.  In the about example, The word “SIR” starts in the third line, fourth letter, and reads up to the right.
In Blindfold Word Search, you are told which seven words to find; your task is to find them in the grid.  You can adjust both the number of words to find, and the maximum length of a word.
Each month, we create another theme-based word puzzle.  The basic game comes with numbers, months, dogs and cats.  In May, we created a food theme including vegetables, candies and fruits, and numbers.  In June, we released a sports pack for baseball, football and hockey, and a geography pack including countries, states, state capitals and world cities.
To download Blindfold Word Search, tap here:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blindfold-word-search/id1227112282?ls=1&mt=8