Last week in class we all presented our second digital artifacts. There was a wide range of topics and technologies discussed, but before I get to them, I will talk about my own project. My project took the form of a spaced repetition system for teaching dyslexic children the sounds associated with different letters of the alphabet. I received a ton of great feedback from the class, as well as from a visitor to the class who happened to be dyslexic. Here are some of the suggestions that I got:
-While advertising may be a good way to keep the project economically viable, given the high concurrence of ADD and dyslexia, it is probably a bad thing to have advertising on any page containing a flash card. I should note that the advertising I was thinking of would be for other educational products only, and would not be anything garish that was likely to drive users away.
-It might be useful to have an audio file attached to each flashcard, as the pronunciation of some letters might not be instantly obvious to parents. I hope to add this feature before presenting during the final class session.
-The system could be more effective if it eventually began to incorporate flashcards with more than one letter. I agree completely with this, and, if I were to fully develop my project, I would love it to be a more long-term, comprehensive system. However, for the purposes of presenting for this class, I wanted to keep the artifact both focused and simple, and thus decided only to focus on single letters.
I was excited about pretty much every other project presented. However, it was the two ideas for games that really caught my eye. Catherine’s Zoo Escape game had beautiful concept art, and I wanted to play it myself. Furthermore, Jacob’s idea for a biology video game seemed incredibly viable. Many science teachers I had tried to make science “real” for us through the use of metaphor. Different systems in nature were compared to things we were already familiar with. This both excited us as students and made the concepts easier to learn. The power of Jacob’s idea is that it relies on such comparisons, which are plentiful. The example he brought up was comparing a red blood cell to a spaceship picking up different cargos. This is an easy concept to grasp for any child who has seen a science fiction movie, as well as a pretty apt metaphor. Through the use of such metaphor in a game, I feel as though his game could not only garner an audience, but actually be successful at imparting knowledge. I hope that he develops his idea further and that I see more like it in the future.