The iPhone and iPod Touch are very interesting platforms for enabling technology. Touch, accelerometers, portability, radio, coolness; they’ve got it all.
But the rules of program distribution are so ridiculous that I can’t imagine playing by them. I want to give my apps away. And I want to do it without some faceless technician’s approval.
After you’ve done the work to develop your App they can reject it without giving any reason.
This recent post from Riverturn illustrates the problem though I’ve heard of many more cases like this.
I’m thinking of things we can do with the nearly ready Wiimote (and Balance Board) capability in our Outfox extension. We can use the accelerometers, IR camera, buttons, and rumble. I’m going to list game/activity ideas so I can recruit some help.
I’m thinking about the client-side interface to our Big Words project with the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies. Rebecca is making good progress on the server-side logic for the games, the instructive feedback machinery that is the essence of this approach. But we need a good looking user interface to keep kids coming back.
Karen suggests it might be useful to develop VR scenarios to help kids become accustomed to normally stressful audio over stimulation without the added social burden of having to deal with people at the same time. For example, many kids can’t go to the movie theater because the THX sound thing at the beginning overwhelms them. If they could experience that THX sound in a controlled environment with gradually increasing volume it might not be so bad when it happened at the theater.
Lots of other situations could be handled similarly.
Another neat idea from Karen. There have been some news stories about a DVD that helps kids with autism learn to read faces and emotions. It would be cool to do a version which allows folks to upload their own pictures and which presents the faces in an interactive web site.
Karen says many kids in wheelchairs never get to experience typical theme park rides. What can we do about that?
We could build or buy a platform that can tilt (say) 20 degrees in two directions under computer control. I don’t think it has to be very high performance at all. We roll the kid’s chair onto the platform and strap it down.
John suggests a platform with a center pivot, springs on 2 sides and stepper motors with cables on the other 2 sides. Missy says we should ask Disney who have all this figured out.
A group of our students go out to a theme park (or the state fair) and record wide-angle HD video, acceleration and good audio. Then we synchronize playback on a big screen (or screens). Perhaps a sub woofer adds some low frequency shake (or maybe the platform could do this). I don’t think we need any “wash out” algorithm for the motion platform. Simply, display the best approximation to the direction of the gravity vector that the tilt platform can manage. We might want to rotate the image to undo some of the tilt. That would be an interesting study on its own.
The log flume ride would be perfect for this. We could spray the rider with some water at the end!
Then we can invite kids in for a virtual carnival or theme park field trip. That would be a ton of fun and an exciting project. Later groups of students could do fully computer generated graphics and sound as more advanced projects.
John suggests we could record historic train rides and such for more educational content.
We link to Tar Heel Reader by having kids read about the experience beforehand and write about it afterward!
I’m going to try to resist immediately jumping on this until I find some $ to pay for it.
My friend Michelle’s son Alex is autistic. We visited them on Saturday night. While Michelle and the rest of us were doing whatever, Alex was playing with an R2D2 toy.
This toy performs actions based on speech recognition.
Alex: “Hey R2″
R2: affirmative beep (sounds like “Boo-Boop”)
Alex: “Do yamgine?”
R2: negative beep (sounds like “Bee-Bawp”)
Alex: “Do you ‘magine?”
R2: negative beep
Michelle: “Do you remember?”
R2: affirmative beep
Michelle: “Darth Vader?”
R2: scared noise and shaking head and moving in circles (sounds like “wa-a-a-hoo!”)
REPEAT w/o michelle for like an hour
the kid was HIGHLY motivated to say the right stuff, and kept at it.
what if there was a web framework (through flash or silverlight?) and a teacher could program in like the vocab, and a storyline (maybe somehting like tarheel reader could help create some default storylines (TANGENT: we should try to have some of your projects seed other as possible) and then the kid tries to say it, this would be for kids with speech issues.
maybe the kid’s a detective, and has to go around quesitoning people, maybe at first it acknowledges bits and pieces (i.e.”Hey ” “where were you?” “?”) then later it only acknowledges at the end
maybe how tolerant it is of sound deviating depends on the kid’s level and their recent success rate…
I love it! This could make a very interesting student project and would take our work in a different and exciting direction.
Who would benefit? students with visual impairment – and students that need more cuing than they get from visual supports on the printed page
Use vibration feedback in TTS, screen readers, digital auditory text
To cue for bold text, boxed info, important information
Software could “read” the text/page and insert vibration to cue the student
But more importantly, to allow the student to tag the auditory text – when they “re-read” the text, the tags trigger vibration. Use different types of vibration (intensity, pattern, etc) for different types of tags.
Tag as a highlighter, tag a phrase or a paragraph
Tag specific info they need to capture (main characters, literary action)
Tag for references
Tag as notetaking – retrieve only tagged information for later?
Karen suggested long ago and I failed to blog about it, that the WiiMote could be useful for “keeping beat with reading. Kid reads along with program, keeps beat. Shakes the controller on the key words. That way you know the kid is reading.”
Seems to me there is great synergy between these ideas. This would make a great student research project.
I have this feeling that there is a fun game idea in here for Maze Day (and beyond). I’m not sure what it is. Perhaps you press a square on the DDR Pad to hear one phrase “mahna mahna, dee dee da dee dee”. Then you have to press another one to go to the next phrase? Or perhaps it is a joint effort between two kids? One doing “mahna mahna” and the other doing the dee’s? Maybe the background is playing in a loop and you have to queue the “mahna mahna” at the right time like Guitar Hero?
Give it a listen and then give me some ideas in the comments.
Paul posted a really nice video about using Tar Heel Reader over at YouTube. The puppet and the stop motion self assembly of the switch interface are great! Check out Reading with Franz.