The field trip on Wednesday is really educating. As soon as I entered the school, I suddenly realized that although the special school is also on Century Avenue, where our school is located, if we don’t pay attention, we wouldn’t find that there are many people in the world who are suffering from the disabilities. This group of people deserves more care. After observing their club activities and individual training, I also realized that being a teacher for special school requires much more patience compared to teachers in normal schools. Regardless of their additional knowledge, they have to deal with special kids, teachers have the patience I can’t image when facing endless incidents made by kids. I kept thinking about how to help the teacher to teach kids with more focus and easier for students to follow. For example, the African drum could actually be turned into a game for students to train their focus. We could set a sensor in the teacher’s drum to detect when the teacher bangs the drum, and send this signal to students’ drums with LEDs. So students will receive sound and visual inputs to ask them to also bang the drums, and I guess that could improve student’s focus.
Describe your project idea (individual)
Describe your partner as a person (not PwD)
He is a 30-year old male who loves playing computer games and using the computer to search for knowledge(e.g. how to take public transportation from home to NYU Shanghai).
What are their desires/challenges/difficulties?
As he is deaf and cerebral palsy, he has difficulty in communicating with people. Actually, during our first conversation with him, the conversation was basically dominated by his mother who is quite talkative. So we found that communication is the problem we need to help him to solve.
What is your project? 1 paragraph description + Photos + Videos
We want to build a portable electronic writing board for him to carry on wherever he goes. The board should be easy for him to write, and easy for other people to read, and write him back. Additionally, it should be easily erased, so that’s why we don’t use a traditional writing board.