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Tactopus

Teaching and learning activities for children with special needs

The target outcome of the education of students with learning disabilities is to prepare them for independent living in their own environments by familiarizing them with their immediate and secondary environments.

Tactopus caters to children aged 3-12 years with behaviour, motor, academic, and speech delays or concerns. They work simultaneously across all the 5 domains of development: speech & language, cognition, socio-emotional, fine and gross motor skills.

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They work with special educators to facilitate online remedial sessions, special education, behaviour therapy and counselling. 

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For these online sessions, both the educator and the child need resources like worksheets that they can work on during a session.

My role at Tactopus was to design such activities for aiding vocabulary building in day-to-day situations.

Background

For cognitive disabilities such as Autism, Down Syndrome and Dyslexia, learning has to be broken down and divided into a step-by-step manner. It is essential to break everything down to its most fundamental component.

| As these students tend to be visual learners, visual and tactile aids such as flash cards, books, stories, activities and videos are of utmost importance to aid teaching and learning.

It is also important to help students understand WHY they are learning something. For example, when teaching the number ‘1’, parallels from real life should be drawn to help create connections. Otherwise, the child may recognize ‘1’ to just be a vertical line. Providing visual cues like the 1 o’clock on the clock, 1 rupee coin, etc. can help the student in forming connections and relating to their environment.

Creating teaching & learning materials with the learning outcome ‘Vocabulary Building- early language in day-to-day life’ for various themes.

Activities had to be categorized according to:

  • Templatability - inter and intra-theme transferable

I was working with sub-themes like fruits, vegetable, vehicles and animals so the activities had to be designed in such a manner that they can be replicated within other sub-themes. 

  • Time commitment

Specifying the approximate time that would be required to complete the activity so as to help in lesson planning for a remedial session.​

  • Dependency

Can the activities be done independently or required assistance from the teacher/parent.​

Outcomes to be achieved:

  1. Identification of object in context (3D)

  2. Identification of image (2D)

  3. Recall image from oral name

  4. Distinguish from other objects (inter, intra theme)

Mediums to be designed for:

  1. worksheets : like writing, colouring

  2. physical manipulation : like cutting, pasting

  3. digital activities : like audio/video aids

Creating assets - 2D Illustrations

Worksheets

Worksheets include writing, tracing, colouring, matching, marking etc.
Drag them around and click to expand!​

Physical Manipulatives

These include cutting, pasting, placing activities. These help in refining motor skills and memory retention.
Drag them around and click to expand!​

Digital activities

Since the remedial sessions are conducted online, use of audio/visuals is an added area to explore. I created drag-and-drop presentations, play-and pause videos and an interactive game on Google Slides.

Drag-and-drop activities

Interactive Games on Google Slides

Audio/Visual Aids

My takeaways

Being a design intern at Tactopus helped me understand and lay the foundations for building for accessibility and inclusive design. I have since then gone on to further expand on this and completed a course on How to Design for Accessibility. I highly recommend this course to every designer I get to interact with!
I believe this is a side of design that is of utmost importance and understanding how to really build for accessibility is a task that I would love to take on.

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