During 2017 I participated in two Makatons, planning ball games for children with disabilities.
Play-Ball game
A challenge was set by the organizers of TOM 2017 Makaton to help children in Oz school (and hopefully others in the future) to play a ball-passing game. I worked on this challenge with Moran, Avi, Noy, and a few more wonderful people.
A picture of the main team: Moran, myself, Noy, Limor (from Oz school) and Avi
Background
TOM is a global movement of communities connecting makers, designers, developers, and engineers with people with disabilities ('Need-Knowers') to develop technological solutions for everyday challenges.
Oz is a special education school for students with moderate to severe developmental disabilities.
Goal
Creating a ball passing game for two players with motor and mental disabilities.
Gathering Requirements
We had several discussions with Oz teachers, helping us understand better the children's abilities and needs, set requirements, and finally - prioritize the requirements.
The players
2 children with Cerebral Palsy (CP), in wheelchairs, with motor and mental disabilities at different levels, sometimes visual disabilities as well.
Detailed Characteristics:
The players are seated in wheelchairs at different heights, and mostly unable to operate them independently
Different abilities of hand movement, but everyone can produce a gentle push in some direction (not everyone can push forward)
The best control is usually knee-high or belly-high, sometimes at chest height
Catching a ball may be hard, the ball may escape
For some players there are limitations in peripheral vision and cortical vision (only high color contrast is visible).
A moderator will be available (a staff member)
Experience goals:
Feeling of Control - a clear connection between the player's action and the result
Feeling of Success
Interaction between players (preferably cooperative and not competitive)
Direct contact with the ball
Minimal need in help from staff
Challenge - adapted difficulty to the players' specific abilities
Educational goal:
If possible, to allow improvement of motor abilities over time.
Other Characteristics:
The device should be easy to store and/or easy to move.
Auditory feedback can be helpful for players with visual disabilities
Prioritization
We saw potential conflict between the "feeling of Success" requirement and the requirements of "feeling of control", "challenge" and "direct contact with the ball", as well as between the "direct contact with the ball" requirement with "minimal need in help from staff". We decided to prioritize direct contact with the ball as the highest and then the feeling of success over the rest of the requirements.
Creative thinking:
After we had our prioritization clear, we could concentrate on the solution.
We knew that the easiest way to reach success would be by allowing control of the ball via some kind of button, but this solution didn't go with our main goal of physicality and direct control.
We had a few ideas regarding ways of physical control:
1 - putting the ball at the end of an inversed pendulum
2 - using a table with margins allowing the ball to roll and not fall
3 - using a seesaw structure
4 - using two fixed incline lanes for the ball (a moderator would have to move the ball from one lane to the other for most players).
Both 3 and 4 concepts are based on rolling the ball with the help of gravitation but are different in the manner in which transition is made from the having player 1 passing to player 2 and the other way around.
User – testing:
We built a prototype that allowed us to test both 3 and 4 concepts (with a light modification):
We started the test with concept 4 (two separate tracks). It seemed more promising because although it required help from a staff member, it only required a small push to operate:
But right after we started testing we realized that the players were able to tilt the track on which the ball arrived to them, and this was their intuitive reaction, so we made small changes and continued testing with concept 3, and found it successful with all players:
The players seemed to understand the concept and improve the more they played. And they only needed external help when the ball fell to the floor.
Final Product:
We used broomsticks to build the rolling track since we didn't find any tubes in the right diameter for the required ball size.
At each end, we created two types of handles, for players sitting in different heights.
We added bells, to give auditory feedback for players with vision impairment. We placed them in the middle of the track, marking the ball's passing through the balance point.
The game is in use in Oz school and evoked some interest from parents who saw it presented on the last day of the Makaton.
Even children with high ability, standing children, and typically developing children seemed to enjoy the device and invented different games that could be played with it. See a girl playing a single-player balance game:
The structure of the device is quite aesthetic but requires a lot of work to build:
Simplifying the design could allow easier replication, and help more people. Our team members stay in touch, and maybe in the future, we, or someone else, will improve this feature of the game.
Bowling game A couple of months later, I met with Moran and Avi from the original group, joined by some great people from On school, during a game Hackathon ran at the school. A Ynet report on the event (our game is shown at 00:31 and then 01:30 in the video).
We used our original seesaw structure concept to build a more challenging game, meant for older children with higher motor abilities.
We designed the board with a sportive style, looking similar to a bowling alley, but we built side protectors against the ball falling:
We used magnets to hold the pins in place when the board is tilted, and we added a sack-basket to collect the knocked pins:
The game was placed at the schoolyard (and a bridge of bells was added to it by the staff, following our advice).
The children are said to enjoy this game very much and use it daily.