Comp 080 Enabling Technology

With Charley Finley’s lecture today we’re beginning a unit on deafness, Deaf culture, ethics, and the meaning of disability. I hope you will find the topic interesting and thought provoking. I encourage you to pay close attention to the discussion and explore resources elsewhere because your next assignment will be writing a paper on your reaction to the topic. You may find it useful to take some notes to remind you of the aspects you found most interesting.

Next class we’ll watch “Sound and Fury”. Wow.

Also, let’s think about ways to make Guitar Hero accessible. Or something like Guitar Hero. Perhaps we could do Drum Hero on the DDR pad with a child sitting in the middle? Maybe we pick some tunes with obvious and repetitive drum parts to start. Then your goal is to hit the pad on the beat? Maybe with with two obvious drum instruments you have to hit both at the right time. I’m thinking of something with a back beat.

I’d like a separate discussion of how we might generalize DDR to make it more accessible. Who says that the steps have to be given? Suppose the goal was to move creatively to the music? I bet some of you could have looked a lot cooler if you were making it up rather than trying to follow that rote drill. Discussion starters:

1. Suppose part of the fun is figuring out how to get the highest score?
2. Maybe the score is some simple function of timeliness and energy?
3. Maybe the score depends on how different your pad selections are?
4. Maybe simply moving to the music is the goal.
5. Using the pad is cheap and simple but we could imagine pointing a web-cam at the player. How does that change things?
6. Remember Pete’s suggestions about collaborative play (included below to remind you).

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Last class we played with DDR (and Guitar Hero but I’ll ask about that in another post). I’d like us to have a discussion of how an accessible version of DDR might work. For this discussion I want you to limit yourselves to DDR with prescribed steps. That is, just like the game we saw in class. You need to press the correct pad at just the right time.  Let’s discuss ways that could work for people who are blind.

Some ideas to get you started:

1. How about 4 speaker stereo sound with something (speech, beeps, ?) coming from the corresponding speaker?
2. How about speech instructions that are some fixed distance ahead in time?
3. How about a training mode that is (say) slowed down with steps described and a separate play mode without speech?
4. Other ideas?

From the NY Times is an interesting read.

Hark the Sound is a simple sound game that is playable by kids who are blind.

Your assignment is:

1. Read about it, download it, try it out.
2. Propose a new game to implement with it. We’ll brainstorm game ideas on the 18th. Email your proposal to me no later than 8am on the 20th and I’ll give you feedback and approval to proceed with implementation.
3. Implement your proposed game and be prepared to share it by 27 September 2 October.

The current implementation of Hark the Sound is flawed making sharing games unnecessarily difficult. I’ll bang out some kind of tool to package your games so that I can add the best of them to the Hark the Sound distribution.

I know some of you can’t make lunch around noon so how about Tuesday 18 September at 2pm? No more than 3 of you can sign up using the comments.

Have you heard about the APPLES Alternative Spring Break experience to Mexico? Now is YOUR chance to participate!

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What is AirMusician ? How might we use this for an ET project?

Another chance to meet outside class on Monday 17 September at noon. No more than 3 of you claim a spot by commenting on this post. We’ll meet in the lobby of Sitterson.