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Christa Wheeler
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Sirin Yaemsiri
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More Than a Game
Christa Wheeler flips the switch on a small black box connected
to four toys, and the unmistakable beginning notes of "Take
Me Out to the Ballgame" emanate from a toy.
But which toy? That's part of the fun and challenge for
visually impaired toddlers who play the orientation game.
The toys connect individually to the box by 15-foot cables.
The game's goal is to induce a toddler to crawl toward the
music, experience the tactile features of the noise-making
toy and push a button that will send the sound and the
curious child to another toy across the room.
Wheeler and fellow applied sciences major Sirin Yaemsiri,
seniors at UNC-Chapel Hill, used biology, physics, and engineering
knowledge to create the orientation game from a research
project. Along with mentor Dr. Richard Goldberg, they gave
the game to an orientation and mobility therapist in Alamance
County, N.C. The therapist then set the game up for a 16-month-old
boy with severe visual impairment.
"He had the biggest smile on his face as he played
with the toys and listened to the music," said Yaemsiri.
As children play the game regularly, said Wheeler, they
should experience more cause-and-effect connections between
their actions and the change in music. "The sound is
an incentive to move."
The project began with Dr. Gary Bishop's class project to
create a device to assist people with a disability. "Our
class was really interesting," said Bishop, an associate
professor in the department of computer science. "We
had 22 students studying assistive technology and doing projects
in small teams. Half of the students were women. That's unprecedented
in the computer science department."
Yaemsiri and Wheeler knew of other projects created by students
of Goldberg, an assistant professor in UNC's School of Medicine's
department of biomedical engineering. With Goldberg's encouragement
and guidance, Yaemsiri and Wheeler secured a UNC summer undergraduate
research fellowship to continue their work. The fellowships,
administered through UNC's Office of Undergraduate Research,
are supported with funds from the Smallwood Foundation and
other sources. A National Science Foundation grant supplemented
their fellowship.
With funding secured, the students turned their blueprint
into a game that actually engages a visually impaired toddler.
Yaemsiri and Wheeler worked with the child's family, his
teacher from the Governor Morehead School's preschool program
for visually impaired children in Raleigh, and an orientation
and mobility therapist.
When correctly used, the toys (each commercially manufactured
but adapted for the project) are placed several feet apart,
with the control box under a sofa or otherwise inaccessible
to the child.
The toys have tactile features, and the control box, which
has switches for four different songs, allows for a "random" or "ordered" sequence.
In the ordered mode, the child becomes familiar with the
room's layout by hearing the toys activate in a predetermined
order. After learning the ordered sequence, the child may
find the random mode an interesting challenge.
The students had to create a safe, intriguing, and durable
game for toddlers while pursuing other goals, too. "One
was to encourage crawling. The second was to encourage reach
on sound.' The game won't teach a visually impaired toddler
to reach on sound as is. Therapy is necessary to help the
toddler understand that sound has a physical source and a
corresponding tactile stimulus, said Yaemsiri.
The game's complicated creation involved circuitry, audio
tapers, toggle switches and other wiring. To Goldberg, Yaemsiri
and Wheeler, the biggest satisfaction was not in the "gee-whiz" nature
of pioneering technology as undergraduates but in the technology's
ability to make a positive difference in the lives of toddlers.
The two students used small, logic computer chips for the
game, but subsequent versions by other students will include
bigger chips to hold entire programs. We learned a lot during
the process, Yaemsiri said. It taught us how to take a
concept all the way through design to the product delivery
stage.
With plans for graduate school, the two will graduate in May.
Wheeler, of West Lake, Ohio, may study neuroprosthetics. Yaemsiri,
of Raleigh, N.C., may teach English in Japan before entering
a graduate program in applied ocean science. Meanwhile, the
two will present their work at a Washington, D.C., undergraduate
research conference then at a design contest sponsored by the
Rehabilitation Engineering Society of North America.
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