Category: Assistive Technology

DSS Service-Learning Course: Assistive Technology

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Assignment 6 #2 Reflection on Field Trip by Sharon

Reflection on the field trip to the Vocational school

  1. Describe your observations on their classes

Vocational schools pay more attention to training children in vocational skills so that they can find jobs in society in the future. We first visited the cafe in the school. There are four or five waiters and two baristas in the cafe. They were all students at school, learning how to work in a cafe. I tasted the drinks in the cafe and they were very good 🙂

Then we went to the pottery classroom at school. I was shocked by the students’ ceramic works. The little models they make are so cute. After talking with their teacher, I learned that their works sometimes are used for the charity sale, and the money will be donated to the people in need, which is very respectable.

Then we visited the Chinese pastry class. A student showed us the equipment in the kitchen. I tasted the little “rabbit bun” they made, which looked very lovely. I felt the students are very professionally trained in pastry.

For cooking training, the school has two classrooms: one for professional training, and one for daily cooking training for students who cannot meet the professional requirements, so that even if they cannot become professional cooks, they can still cook for themselves in their daily life. I think this classification is very scientific and effective, considering the needs of different types of students.

What technologies can improve their learning?

During the visit, we attended a teacher’s meeting on the design of teaching materials. The teachers demonstrated their designing goals, the designing process, and the teaching tools they had designed, such as appreciation cards, picture books, cards that could be pasted onto a poster, online study documents, and so on. What impressed me was the appreciation cards and the picture book. The teacher who designed the appreciation cards wrote different notes on the cards according to the students’ learning level, which I think is very effective for the learning process. The design of picture books inspires me to use some visual technologies, such as animation and interactive devices, which can improve students’ interest and make them better understand what they are learning. The visual technologies make up for the lack of “interactivity” in picture books.

Overall experience and observation

I think the vocational school does a good job in vocational training for students. Schools have different categories of majors, and also students are trained according to their level in different majors. The teachers also prepared the courses carefully and designed teaching materials to help students learn better. Through attending the teachers’ meeting, I think visual materials play a great role in teaching, which is what we need to think more about in the following design process. After this visit, I got to know more about the special vocational school and understood that even though the students in that school are called “special”, they can gain high professional skills by learning.

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Assignment 6 #1 Project Development by Sharon

Project development (individual)

  1. Describe your partner

  My partner is called Orange. She is an energetic, open-minded, positive woman. She attended Hackability in the summer, and she got the product from that workshop, which is a cup holder. She is easy-going, and the communication between us is smooth. Orange is very observant of life. When asked if there was anything inconvenient for her in our academic building, she gave her answer: some elevators for 1-15F have no handrails or lower buttons, and she can’t push the higher ones. Also, some floors do not have accessible toilets for the disabled, and even if they did, the slope of the step of the accessible toilet was too steep for her wheelchair to climb. She is good at finding many small things in life and can inspire my partners and me a lot.

2. What are their desires/challenges/difficulties?

  She is clear about what her problem is and what the requirement would be, which helps us define the question we need to solve. Her main difficulty is that when it rains, it is inconvenient for her to hold the umbrella with one hand and control the wheelchair with the other. She wants us to help her make an umbrella holder that could attach to her wheelchair to support her umbrella. She wants to put away the umbrella stand when it’s not raining. 

3. What is your project? 1 paragraph description + Pictures or Photos or Videos

   Our project is a removable, collapsible, stable umbrella holder. It is mainly made of steel and plastic, as shown in the figure below, so it’s stable enough to support the umbrella. There are many rotating areas on the holder, so the holder can easily adjust the angle according to the needs of Orange. This product can help Orange to free her hands on rainy days, and she doesn’t have to worry about going out on rainy days. When not in use, the holder can be secured to the chair by straps.

4. Development process. Include photos and video(s)

We made the first model out of paper, determining where the holder should be placed in the wheelchair, how to rotate it, how to fold it. And then, we tested the second prototype made out of the harder material, a water pipe, to see how hard the material should be to support the umbrella and further discussed how to fix the bottom of the umbrella. Then we got the harder stuff, assemble the parts, and discussed how the holder could be attached to the wheelchair. We tried many different rotating angles and positions, and finally found a reasonable model (as shown in the figure below). When not in use, the holder can be easily put away. Combined with the pictures of the wheelchair, we have decided which part of the wheelchair we are going to install the holder. 

      

Last Tuesday, we met Orange and tested the prototype in her wheelchair. It turned out that the vertical length was too short and it needed to be increased.

Also, according to the requirements of Orange, the transverse length of the support should be shortened. Since each part of the holder had been completely connected, my partner and I decided to take the holder apart, reassemble and connect it. We removed the four iron pipes from the previous two prototypes, using the shorter one as the transverse pipe and the longest one as the longitudinal pipe. We used heated glue and screws to make the holder solid enough to hold the umbrella. So the length problem is solved.

Also, when the holder is not in use, after discussing with Orange, we decided to use a strap to tie it onto the wheelchair. We attached the hook and loop fastener to the pipe using heated glue so that it can tie the other pipe firmly.

What’s more, when interviewing with Orange, she told us that she seldom goes out at night because she’s afraid the cars on the road won’t be able to see her wheelchair, which could be dangerous. To solve this problem, we put reflective stickers on orange’s wheelchair in all directions, so that when the lights hit orange’s wheelchair, the stickers will reflect light, making orange safer to go out at night.

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Assistive Technology Week 6 Assignment 2 – Elysia

Last Wednesday, we went to the campus behind Meng CafĂ©. It was a very beautiful campus with great scenery. We were led by a teacher and was showed many classes and activities.  The first class that we went to was a ukulele building class. There were about 15 students in the class (if im not wrong) with varying ages. They were tasked with putting the strings of the ukulele. I recognized that they have also decorated the ukulele with some kind of snow slime. They were very creative with the colors and overall decoration. Some children were having difficulties putting on the strings, and one kid kept failing over and over again and then he got upset. But the teachers were quick to react and help him. The second class is a paper art-making class. The students were tasked with rolling long sheets of colorful papers and glue them onto a sheet of paper. I observed that some of the students love the repetitive task of rolling the paper, it’s like their favorite activity. Some other kids are very hyperactive and start dragging me and my friends to see his art. It was a very fun experience interacting with the kids. The last class that we went to is a one-on-one class. The teacher was teaching the student how to cut the paper into a perfect circle and glue them into pieces of paper. She used videos and physical toys to familiarize the student with the item that she was going to teach him. In that class, she showed him videos of how to cut the circles and made him blow actual bubbles. The class was pretty short but was very condensed. The student frequently loses his focus, probably because we were invading his classroom.

 

Pic1. The student’s artwork

pic2. The shop inside the school

From my observation, I believe that technology can and will play an important part in their learning. One aspect that they can incorporate technology in the classroom is on the one-on-one session. The teacher can use an interactive screen to make the student interact more with the items and become more familiarized. It might work or it might not, but I feel like everything depends on the condition of the students. Because every material needs to be tailored to what each student needs in order for the teaching to be effective and efficient.

Overall, I have learned many things from the experience. The children were very delightful to interact with, and the classrooms were nice and very accommodating for the students. The teachers were inspiring and passionate. I feel like the school provides a very good education for the children. The visit made me realize that even though they might experience more difficulties in learning than regular children, they are also capable of creating amazing artworks and be a contributing member of society. The fact that some of the graduates’ work at Meng Café also proves the fact that they can be a capable and independent individual.

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Assistive Technology Week 6 Assignment 1 – Elysia

In our Assistive Technology class, I and my teammates are partnered with a girl named Siyi, or we usually call her Lamb. Because of hypoxia that happened on her birth—in which her body was deprived of the necessary oxygen—her body, brain, and other organs were damaged and never fully recovers. Thus, she has been living in a wheelchair for most of her life. Even so, she still keeps her spirit and warmth as she tried to help others by sharing her kindness. She is very communicative and eager to be involved in our projects. Even with the language barrier that I struggled with since I don’t speak Chinese, she’s very expressive in communicating what she desires and expectations. Her mother also helped a lot in bridging the conversation between us and Lamb. We are very grateful to have been working with her in the past weeks.

Lamb’s desire is to be able to go out by herself. In other words, she wants to be more independent. However, living in a wheelchair significantly impact the options that she has in order to acquire independency. Simple tasks can sometimes be very difficult due to the limitations caused by the wheelchair. For example, she mentions that going to the bus are hefty because there is no ramp to bridge the gap between the ground and the bus. Another thing that she mentions is that she has difficulties using an umbrella during rains. Her mother is the one that is usually holding the umbrella, so she wants a way to hold the umbrella for herself. That will surely help her become more independent. In addition to that, the umbrella will be attached to her electronic wheelchair, so that she can freely move and control the umbrella.

Our project is centered on solving her umbrella problem. We think that it is important to provide her with a way to go through the rainy season with the umbrella at hand. We also decided to focus on the case when she doesn’t know for sure if it’s going to rain or not, so she’s going to bring the umbrella as a precaution. Her mother can help her put the umbrella on the holder before going out. When she goes out and It starts to rain, she can turn the rotation of the holder, and tighten the stick by spinning a knob. Afterward, she will have to push the umbrella upwards to open it. We thought about using an automatic umbrella, but it was too heavy on her. We don’t want the umbrella to suddenly collapse on her due to the weight. A raincoat is also ineffective as it is hard to put the raincoat on her body. Therefore, we concluded that this was the best scenario for our project.

Last week we were supposed to have our last user testing before the presentation. Unfortunately, Lamb was not able to come because she was not feeling well. This is also another reason why we think it is important to provide her with an umbrella, so she won’t catch a cold. Then, we brainstormed for a while and made many prototypes to fix the problem with the joint. Initially, we wanted to make the joint very easy to rotate but also strong enough to hold the weight of the umbrella. We used a gorilla pod leg as the joint of the stick, but after testing, we realized that it was not strong enough to hold the weight of the umbrella. There is a bigger gorilla pod leg, but it is too hard to separate. Thus, the only choice we have left is to ask Lamb next week whether she can operate the umbrella holder by herself.

 

pic1. the holder

pic2. The gorilla pod holder

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Week 6 Project Documentation – Iris

1. Describe Your Partner 

My partner Lamb is a seventeen-year-old girl. She lives in the Putuo district in Shanghai, where is far away from our school. She just graduated from the special school in Putuo last year. She has a disability of controlling her body well because of hypoxia at birth, but her intelligence is no different from others. She participated in the Hackability in NYUSH before and is enthusiastic about this kind of activity. She told me that she posted a video of the Hackability on his Weibo. She is an optimistic and outgoing girl. Although she can’t speak fluently, she is very willing to talk to other people. When we asked some questions about what difficulties or problems they met in daily life, she interrupted her mother and told us that there is a gap between the subway and the ground so that it’s hard for the wheelchair to get on the subway. She is very warmhearted and participates in lots of public service activities. I saw in her mother’s Wechat moment that she donated five boxes of gifts to the blind people to try her best to cheer those who need help. 

2. What are their desires/challenges/difficulties?

Lamb’s desire is to go out alone with her electronic wheelchair. If she go out by herself and it suddenly rain, it would get her into trouble since she can’t hold an umbrella by herself and she has to control her wheelchair. 

Their main difficulty is transportation. Lamb’s mother told us that their home is far away from the subway station so that she has to push the wheelchair to walk for more than ten minutes to get to the station. Another problem is that the buses are almost inaccessible to them because of two reasons. Firstly, it’s hard for the wheelchair-user to get on to the bus because of the stairs. Secondly, in most buses, there is no space for a wheelchair, not to mention facilities that help to fix the wheelchair. The third problem is that Lamb wants to go out by herself alone with her electronic wheelchair, but she can’t if it’s the rainy day because only her right hand has force so that if she holds an umbrella, she can’t control the electronic wheelchair. 

3. What is your project?

Our project is an umbrella holder that can be fixed in the wheelchair. Lamb can use it if the weather report said that it might be raining when she goes out with her electronic wheelchair alone. She said she will not go out if it’s raining so that this project is just to in case it rains when she’s outside. Her mother should help her to fix the holder onto the wheelchair and the umbrella to the holder beforehand. After she goes out, if it suddenly rains, she can rotate the holder up and make the joint tighter by spinning a turn-knob. Then open the umbrella by pushing it up. If she is not able to do that, she can ask people around for help. Besides this using, Her mother can also use this to hold the umbrella for Lamb when they go out together. Her mother said that she always wears a raincoat but it’s hard to hold the umbrella for Lamb. Therefore, it would also be useful if they go out together on a rainy day.

4. Development Process

This week we still didn’t have our partner Lamb since she got a bad cold. This also raised our awareness than at umbrella is important for her since she will easily get ill if she catches a cold or gets wet in rain. In order to make a joint that is strong enough to hold an umbrella as well as easy to rotate, we tried to use one leg of a gorilla pod as the joint of our holder. We thought the gorilla pod might be strong enough since it can hold a heavy camera. However, the truth is that it’s easy to rotate but too weak to hold a umbrella. Then, we removed half of the gorilla pod joint to make it shorter to make it stronger. Unfortunately, it’s still not strong enough. Therefore, we decided to test on next Tuesday if Lamb can rotate the original turn-knob by herself. If not, she may have to ask other people’s help when using it.