markdav-is
commented
5 years ago Hi Mark, At Pearl Buck Center, our Academy is now in its second year of operation. Our students range in age from early 20s through 70s and all have a variety of intellectual/development disabilities (I/DD). The goal of our Academy is to help provide students with skills and practice to help the function in the world of work in the wake of the closure of sheltered workshops. In the past, when sheltered workshops were in high use, a typical path for people with I/DD was to gain employment in sheltered workshops after leaving high school. These sheltered workshops provided structure and safety and an opportunity to earn money, but at a rate totally dependent on the percentage a typical worker could do the same job outside of sheltered work - i.e. sub-minimum wage pay in many cases.
From the isolation from the rest of the community and the wage issues, it was determined after decades of this practice laying the groundwork of most of my students adult lives that sheltered work was no longer an option. Pearl Buck Center is one of the only organizations in the state that has committed to helping transition individuals from sheltered workshops into their next opportunities, whether community work, day activities programs or retirement. The Academy is viewed as an integral role is this transformation of Pearl Buck, as well as an important community resource in helping students who have graduated transition programs and are no longer able to stay in school, but also aren't ready to get a community job. We will be moving sometime in the near future to recruiting outside of Pearl Buck, and we'll be seeing many more students between the ages of 21 -30. In the meantime, we are attempting to do innovative work in working with this population that has been widely missed in any academic research. Our main goals are to work on "Soft skills" such as communication, hygiene, basic workplace problem-solving, emotional regulation, etc. To be effective at this work, we need as many tools as possible to help us. Many of our students range from being almost non-verbal to having limited verbal abilities and vocabulary. To truly assess and understand some of their abilities, we need to go beyond aural communication assessments, pen and paper assessments and work simulations to other ways of examining ability. One area that we have not been able to explore is the use of video gaming tools for this need. There are a variety of games available on XBox One that could be useful for assessing students in areas such as spatial skills, problem-solving, memory, pattern recognition to more advanced skills such as deeper understands of specific areas of work. Games such as Farming Simulator and Car Mechanic Simulator provide a safe way to show and demonstrate types of work that students may be interested in. Other games such as Abzu (an underwater sea exploration game with marine life) and Rime (an exploration game with puzzles) allow us to assess spatial skills, problem-solving and specific areas of need in ways that we simply can't now. With two controllers, we can also assess how students do on games requiring teamwork and how students manage their emotions in competitive games (information that would be very useful in the community). Games like Terraria and Minecraft would also provide interesting tools in assessing creativity, structural thinking and a host of other skills. Of course, in addition to assessments, all of these games have the potential for teaching and skill-building. We also believe that having fun is essential to learning, esp. with this population. However, the big catch has been that the standard XBox controller is unusable to some of our students due to their physical limitations. Microsoft has recently released an adaptive controller that would allow all of our students to play games. The following three links show the adaptive controller and how people of different abilities are able to use them. I believe that this will be a great tool allowing for people to play video games who may have never been able to do so before in their lives, providing a fun way to learn and for us to gain valuable information about students and how their interact with the world.
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Video in practice
Another video
With these tools available in our Academy, the opportunities and diversity of experiences that we can offer our students will grow and we can provide a richer learning environment for everyone.
Will Bucknum Pearl Buck Academy - Core Instructor will.bucknum@pearlbuckcenter.com (541) 484-4666 EXT. 5170
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