Last month, ObjectiveEd, our new company, attended Southern Orientation and Mobility Association (SOMA) conference in Tampa.
ObjectiveEd’s mission is to maximize education outcomes for visually impaired students. We provide tools for teachers and skill-building games for students, tied to the the Expanded Core Curriculum and each student’s Individual Educational Plan.
We previewed the first of our Expanded Core Curriculum games: Barnyard. Inspired by Blindfold Barnyard, our new Barnyard game enable students to practice Laterality, Directionality, Touch & Drag and memory. As a teacher, you can monitor each student’s progress on a web-dashboard, and it’s based on our patent-pending innovation entitled “Closed Loop Digital Curriculum”. There’s more info on this at the Objective Ed website, and I will discuss the power of this innovation in future blogs.
For those of you not familiar with Barnyard, here’s how it works.
When you first touch the screen, it tells you a farm animal and where it is. For example, the game says “Cow at 2 o’clock”.
You drag your finger to the upper right of the screen, and eventually your finger will touch the cow. At that point, the cow says “moo moo”.
By the way, in the actual game, the cow is obscured by a large hayfield, so the experience is the same for sighted, low-vision and blind students.
After you touch the cow, you drag it to the fence where other cows are collected, such as the East fence. Each time you drag an animal to the correct fence, you win points. If you drag the cow to where horses are collected, both the cow and all the horses run away.
As a teacher, using the web-dashboard, you can adjust Barnyard to the needs of your students. They can practice complex skills like a combination of clock and compass directions, or simple skills like left vs. right, or anything in between. As a student progresses from skill to skill, the game gets more difficult, keeping the student engaged and challenged.
To find out more about ObjectiveEd, contact me, or visit www.objectiveEd.com