Anyway, here we are: blog post number
two and the first one on actual content! Today, I wanted to provide
an introduction to a project that currently has me very excited:
Together Through Play. I'll try to keep it short: I'll provide
an overview today, and go into more depth on certain aspects of the
Together Through Play is the informal
name for a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust investigating
inclusive play, on which I am Principal Investigator (PI). The
official name for the project is “Facilitating Meaningful Play
Between Disabled and Non-Disabled Children through Participatory
Design”, which is more informative, but also more unwieldy, so we
adopted the Together Through Play moniker (TTP, henceforth, to save
on my fingers!) as a more user-friendly alternative. In fact, this
separation suits me well, as it offers the opportunity to keep the
Together Through Play brand going beyond the three-year scope of the
“Facilitating Meaningful Play...” project and into future
projects. More on that in due course.
Anyway, this is a three year project
which started in January 2011, and will end in December 2013 – so
we're now onto the final straight, and indeed this blog provides one
of the means of disseminating our findings. For now, though, I want
to focus on the background of the project, and what it's all about.
Who's Involved?
There are three
key people involved in the project: I am the PI, and provide the
engineering input to the project; Angharad Beckett from the School of
Sociology and Social Policy (and a fellow member of the Centre for
Disability Studies) is a co-investigator, and provides the
sociological input; and Anne-Marie Moore is the PhD Researcher
employed on the project – she does the day-to-day data gathering
and product testing, which means a lot of liaising with the
participating schools!
In addition, we
have a number of schools involved, and some undergraduate Engineering
and Product Design students have helped to design and build the toys
that we are testing.
What's the Project About, then?
In one sentence: the aim of the project is to explore the aspirations of disabled and non-disabled children for playing together, the barriers that prevent this, and what might be done to overcome them.
In one sentence: the aim of the project is to explore the aspirations of disabled and non-disabled children for playing together, the barriers that prevent this, and what might be done to overcome them.
Let's unpack what
that actually means. There are a few strands to this.
Firstly, let's
recognise that play is a really important part of child development.
According to the United Nations, “Children have the right to relax
and play, and to join in a wide range of cultural, artistic and other
recreational activities” [1]. It plays an important part in helping
children to develop motor skills, as well as social skills and to
explore and experiment through role-play: David Cohen's “The
Development of Play” [2] provides a good overview of the value of
play in child development, including the helpful observation that
researchers have made play into a “serious business”, as if play
for the purpose of relaxation was somehow a waste of time. That's a
sober warning for us, certainly, and note that the children's rights
include the right to relax! Anyway, the key point here is that play
is important, and if you don't get access to a broad range of play,
then you don't get as much chance to develop skills: be they of the
cognitive, motor or social variety.
Secondly, there is
the matter of integration. There has been a general move towards
inclusive education, meaning that more children with physical or
cognitive impairments are educated in mainstream schools rather than
being segregated into a separate school system. Not all children,
certainly, but more children. However, there is a need to recognise
that just because a child is educated in the same class doesn't
necessarily mean that they're included. Again, I won't go into that
debate here: if you want a good overview, you can refer to Barton and
Armstrong [3]. The point is that inclusivity doesn't just mean
accessibility: it's not sufficient to have disabled and non-disabled
children playing next to each other. They have to be engaging in a
way that is positive for both of them, from which they both benefit
and which they both enjoy. The question is – does this happen? And
if not, is there anything we can do to support this?
Our aim isn't to
develop inclusive toys per se – that's something I have to say
every time I mention the project, because the immediate assumption is
that what we're trying to do is to build inclusive toys. Rather, what
we want to find out is: what are children's aspirations for playing
together? What helps or hinders this? Children are not the easiest
people to interview, especially not on such an emotive subject. So
we've adopted Alison Druin's approach of Co-operative Inquiry [4],
where we encourage children to co-design inclusive toys and games,
not because we assume they'll come up with great toys and games, but
as a way of better understanding what they want from play. The
designs become a focus for discussion, rather than an end in
themselves.
To this end, we've
undertaken several rounds of working with groups of disabled and
non-disabled children, developing ideas into prototypes, testing and
refining them. We're now onto the final stages – we've already
carried out all the user testing we need. Anne-Marie and Angharad in
the process of carrying out a thorough analysis of the data gathered,
and I'm in the process of building one of the two final prototypes
that we'd like to take in for final evaluation by the participating
children. Which has given me a handy opportunity to get my hands
dirty with a Raspberry Pi, PiFace and PyGame, which is always a good
thing!
And for all that –
the concepts, the testing, the analysis – that's for another post.
See you in a fortnight. And who knows? Maybe one of these days I'll
actually get some pictures up on this blog, and get some formatting
sorted out...
References
[1] Article 31 of
the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. An overview can be
found at: http://www.unicef.org/crc/files/Rights_overview.pdf,
accessed 26th July, 2013.
[2] Cohen D.
(2006) The Development of Play. 3rd Ed. Routledge
[3]
Barton
L. and Armstrong F. (2007) Policy, experience and change:
Cross-cultural reflections on inclusive education. Dordrecht:
Springer.
[4]
Druin
A. (1998) The Design of Children’s Technology. San Francisco:
Morgan Kauffman.
No comments:
Post a Comment