IEP Technologies : Expanded Core Curriculum Games for Visually Impaired Students
IEP Process
ObjectiveEd.com is our new company where we are building Expanded Core Curriculum interactive simulations for blind and low vision students, based on a child’s Individual Educational Plan.
The student’s advancement in acquiring skills in these ECC-based games and interactive simulations are preserved in a private secure cloud, visible to the school IEP team in a web-based dashboard .
If you are a TVI , press for additional details on trying these types of games as a tool for maximizing student outcomes, relating to their
RTI and IEP
.
Name That Tune
A good friend of mine suggested building a Name That Tune game. He thought that would be an easy game to create, and would appeal to both sighted and visually impaired people.
I checked, and of course, an iPhone app similar to Name That Tune already exists, but it’s not accessible. One of the Blindfold Game testers mentioned there was an accessible game like that a few years ago, but it hasn’t been updated recently.
The difficulty in building this type of game is finding a source of music. Originally I thought I would access your iTunes library, but everyone told me that they already know those songs, and they would like the game to test them on songs they don’t listen to all the time.
With Apple ‘s iTunes you can preview up to 30 seconds of a song prior to purchasing it, and Apple makes that preview available. The only stipulation is that to access these previews, you must be approved by Apple as an affiliate, and let people purchase a song if they want. Blindfold Games applied to be an affiliate and was approved a few weeks later.
The next step in building the game was determining which music to include. I did a Google search on top 100 pop artists, and discovered that the Billboard website comes first, followed by Rolling Stone, Wikipedia and several other music industry websites.
Once I had the names of the top 100 pop artists, I used the iTunes website search to find several thousand songs by these artists, and used those in the game. I repeated that for rock, hop-hop, classical, country, soul and several other music genres.
The first version of the game plays up to 30 seconds of the song, and then lets you pick from 4 different artists. If you are right, you get points based on how quickly you guessed the answer.
The testers liked the game, but demanded slews of changes. More in the next blog.
To get Blindfold Song Name, tap here:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blindfold-song-name/id1290989842?mt=8