Case Study 4

STUDENT FOUR - a user without conventional language and with complex cognitive and physical disabilities uses a touch-screen monitor with a simple cause and effect game

The clip shows a 14 year-old girl who has quite profound and complex disabilities. She is playing a full-screen computer game in which the animal shapes that float across the screen disappear when touched with an audio effect as the action occurs. Her achievement is rewarded with the words, 'excellent' and 'brilliant' coming up on her screen in a large display font as she achieves each phase of the games task Student Four is assisted by her class teacher who encourages and supports her, drawing her attention back to the screen as it lapses, reading out and reinforcing the game's reward messages with clapping and 'Well done!'. Student four appears to be very pleased with her computer session.

People with more profound learning disabilities often communicate in subtle ways that the inexperienced fail to comprehend, presenting an enigma to all but those who know them well or who specialise in Communication Study. Project Apple includes Researchers with Communication Science expertise, that translates to professional intervention in 'Speech and Language' therapy, who have been building up detailed profiles of individuals' means of communication and identifying their pertinence to the potential use of the Learning Environment and its content under development. Here, simple core competencies are being applied by the user, their reinforcement through using this simple game repetitively contributes to developmental learning. The supported aspect of the ICT work is typical with the desktop providing a shared point of focus for communication as well as the task in hand, a framework for simple structured activity.

Student Four demonstrates:

• The importance of recognising that supporters are normally an integral aspect of individual use of ICT by people with more complex or profound cognitive disability
• The need for those supporters to understand the ways people with cognitive disabilities communicate that might otherwise pass unnoticed or misunderstood
• A system provides a potential focus for communication between user and supporter in which the user with a learning disability and their achievements, however small, is clearly 'centre-stage'
• The central importance of assistive devices like touch-screen monitors to optimise ICT use by a person with cognitive disabilities