Rewire VR Lessons: Open Mind School Experience
At Luden.io, we’re offering our years of expertise in video games to help empower learners and teachers of the world. One of the bonuses of such a job is being able to meet the most interesting educators. Like our friends at Open Mind, an innovative school from Bay Area, San Francisco.
Located right next to Silicon Valley, Open Mind’s employees live up to their name, keeping their doors and, well, minds open to new educational technologies and experiments. Such as Rewire VR Lessons.
After our initial meeting last October, we’ve decided to take our experiments even further. Open Mind’s workers were kind and curious enough to try VR Lessons themselves as well as letting their students play around with it. Below are some thoughts they’ve shared with us afterwards (along with many pages of valuable technical feedback).
Rewire VR Lessons are available for everyone (along with a teacher’s guide) at Rewire.Education website. Sign up and give them a try!
The School
To cultivate the learning of a diverse student population, OMS makes curriculum for different learners accessible. They apply a multi-sensory, project based curriculum that aligns with California state content standards. The curriculum emphasizes enrichment activities and technology as the link binding all learners together. Open Mind’s high adult-to-child ratio allows for program individualization and appropriate social facilitation.
Open Mind’s trans-disciplinary model allows varying specialists to train staff on best practice interventions pertaining to their field. We closely track progress and apply research from current neuroscience and educationally-based procedures.
Matthew Jacobs, Lab Manager, Silicon Valley Social Innovation Lab, Open Mind School
I’ve played Rewire with 10 different kids who ranged from kindergarten age to middle school level, from 4 years old to 13. They were mostly neurodiverse though some of our neurotypical students joined as well. Students ranged from speaking verbally as a main form of communication to those who use other non-speaking forms of communication, like sign language, or paper choices, or letter boards.
I pulled students from our afterschool programs.I made it optional for the kids: as soon as they wanted to leave I let them leave and they only came if they felt like coming; so the fact that they kept coming was due to them wanting to.
The overall thing that I found most interesting is that every single kid who tried VR was at least somewhat motivated to use the VR headset even if they could only tolerate it for 20 seconds. Every single kid looked in it and that’s not something that happens with every activity! At the very least, students were peeking into the headset. Something I noticed is that none of the students covered their ears at any point, which is common for my students with sound sensitivities.
[There is one] student with stronger sensory needs… and as soon as I say — ‘Hey, do you wanna go and put on a headset with me?’ — he just takes my hand and walks with me and transitions easily into the space. And he started by just taking little peeks into the headset, and he was motivated enough to keep taking longer peeks each session, to the point where he was holding the headset, looking around. [In the end] we actually got 10–15 seconds of actually doing the task. And I think for a student with strong sensory needs, to continually put themselves in a situation that might be sensory overwhelming, says a lot of motivation to use [the game].
I went up to a different student and had the funniest conversation. I was like: ‘Hey, can I borrow you for a minute?’, and she looked at me and she said ‘Nah’. Then I said: ‘…to put on goggles and play VR?’, and she said ‘Okay!’, came right with me! (laughs). And there she was, doing this preposition lesson and talking it through with me, and one of her teachers came, and was really impressed with her promptness with responding. She has been working on using language more fluidly. and She tends to usescripting and a lot of echolalia when she communicates… But I found in VR it seemed like she usedlanguagein what seemed to be more accurate in terms of what she intended to be saying. And so she was verbally answering the prompts in game correctly. Often in class she will verbally give an incorrect answer, but point to the correct answer with paper choices.
It was also interesting when she was having motor difficulties with the game, I was trying to help her and she started saying ‘I wanna do it myself, I wanna do it myself!’ which also displayed her desire to succeed independently. I think the thing that I continually saw was a lot of motivation and interest in participating in the activities, that was pretty uniform of all the kids.
I mean, they all had different levels of tolerance for the headset, but they all tried the headset and tried the headset each time I gave them the chance. I think the pizza game was pretty popular! I think the prepositions one was interesting, cause they had a lot of different situations and putting different things to different places…
Some of the students were very interested in the keyboard application in the game. That same little girl ended up spending a good amount of time just writing on the keyboard. he was spelling pretty accurately. I would be interested in thinking of a VR in terms of communication for the students with motor challenges… having a more controlled environment might actually be a way for them to more accurately type or write out what they intend to. Because a lot of times [without VR] I know she can spell but her hand doesn’t always do what she wants it to do…
I think that Rewire would fit in with a lot of more traditional ABA-style programs, where there is a lot more one-on-one working with kids. That’s why Adam on the feedback document has that long list of the things that he would love to have in terms of specific goals and practices… I think that would be really cool especially with kids who have difficulties with transition, having a visual timer built into the game, so a lot of your games end on a reward, it would be really cool if there’s a visual timer… Oh, there already is? (laughing)… So, you guys are ahead of me!
Adam Soffrin, BCBA, Lead Behaviorist, Open Mind School
I’m a BCBA working in the field of special education for about 15 years, and I’ve been a behavior analyst now for about 6 years. In the past I’ve run some home ABA programs, I was a regional director of an agency for a few years. Since then I’ve been independent, doing mostly school and home consults with different school districts and some private clients around the Bay area.
I’ve never actually had a VR headset on, it’s beautiful in here, it’s very peaceful! I absolutely can see the use for this. If you would ask me five years ago, I would’ve said this might be a little complex, but the amount that I’ve seen, even really young kids with high support needs, who are able to interact with YouTube and who are able to navigate an iPad… kids are so into tech right now, this certainly would have a huge appeal to a lot of kids that I work with.
I think a lot of kids who don’t do well in settings where there’s a lot of people around, could feel more comfortable putting on this helmet and truly kind of being in a group setting, but in isolation to at least get them used to the idea being in that setting… I can see a lot of applications for something like this.
This is very, very similar to how the process that I would use to teach a [prepositions] skill like this. In terms of the prompting, in terms of the errorless… You’ve got a little star chart right there so you can see your progress. I see you got a reinforcer with a plane at the end, which was a lot of fun by the way! So yeah, clearly you’ve got a lot of the process down.
I personally like starting in vivo, I’d rather use objects because I think — especially for kids who have representation issues — it’s a lot easier for them to understand, so I would do it very similar to this.
I would start with different objects in the same location that we’ve already mastered, and then I would start to try familiar objects in new locations and ultimately it would be out in the community for full generalization, somewhere in a higher distraction environment, where there’s more going on, maybe an environment they’re not fully familiar with, so that would be the generalization. And I can see that there’s the classroom setting right now, but I can imagine you could have all sorts of different settings just within this program.
When I was working for the ABA agency, we had a big closet in our office that was full of materials that behavior technicians could take and use with their clients, it does involve picking them up and picking them out ahead of time… For certain things like a preposition training type of skill, I don’t know if it’s as hard because really you can use any objects around the house or the student’s classroom, but certainly if we’re doing something like object identification, or specifically animal identification — it’s a lot harder to find three different dog toys, three different lion toys, three different monkey toys…
In the past I had to sit down, take a bunch of different pictures from Google Images and then print them out and then laminate them… Because we want to make sure that they’re not getting torn up or chewed up… Even with the agency, to go back to that, we would have a drawer that would have all these different materials, different pictures, examples… But still, you had to take through this drawer, you had to find examples and sometimes they didn’t quite fit with what you were doing or a student didn’t recognize something as being a dog… I think it does take some time and I think not just that, but the prep and the setup of having everything ready and being able to switch out without distracting a student is also a challenge that this [virtual reality] would alleviate.
It’s a great sort of halfway between images and objects… kids are so tech-savvy at this point! The amount of 3-year olds who I’ve seen who can’t read, but can get their favorite YouTube video once they get their iPad unlocked.
I think they would really enjoy something like this! This doesn’t feel like an ABA session, it does feel like a video game and I think the kids would really get into this, you wouldn’t have to think about distractors. That’s one of the hardest parts when you try to lead a session like this is all the distractions around the room, all the different things… The idea that you can fully focus on something like this and have them be in control is really important.
At our school, we’ve been talking about possibilities of tech and education overlapping and this is very much what I envisioned could be done with the right strategies and the right tools. I certainly see a very positive future for this, I mean, I’m blown away man, this is cooler than I thought! I’m just thinking already about the number of students I have who… just the idea of having an opportunity to play around with the draw would be enough motivation for them to participate in a VR lesson. It covers the teaching aspect, it covers the reinforcement aspect, it covers the generalisation aspect… This could be used easily as an assessment tool if you can be confident that a student has an understanding of what they’re supposed to be doing and how they’re supposed to use it.
I’m sorry, I’ve been using free drawing for too long, this is really fun, you got on that…
Having all the materials in front of you, not having to switch between activities without having to clean up and move on to the next activity… Because a lot of time if you’re going for momentum with a student… When I was with the agency, we would automatically tell the family that the first 15 minutes your kid’s not gonna be involved because we have to set everything up, and the last 15 minutes your kid’s not involved because we’re gonna clean up and collect data. If we were using something like this we would get far more learning opportunities within the time frame and also cutting out that setup and cleanup and data collection because it would be automatically recorded in here — I think that therapists would probably be thrilled to know that they don’t have to keep track of data each time and have a data sheet or some sort of document that they’re using.
What I like about VR versus an iPad is when kids are on iPad I found a lot of times, even with locking out the ‘home’ button these kids are so adapted using iPads that sometimes they see an iPad and think — ‘oh, this is where I play games’, ‘this is where I watch YouTube’, and so you to have to say no, right now this is a tool and once you finish it we can let you play… It can be challenging for kids like that, so I love it when they’re kind of in VR. If you’re even just using flash cards in VR, I think it give you more immersive environment to try it, where you’re not looking for ‘what else can I do here’, that cards themselves and the images themselves or the objects themselves — that is reinforcing, that is what’s fun for these guys.
I think certainly things like practicing being in a community, being in an environment is not familiar to them. We have students here who have issues with environmental noise, when things get loud it’s hard for them, when there’s a lot of movement, when there’s certain lights… The idea that we could have a student practice sitting on a bus with a lot of noise or being in a subway, sitting on a plane… They could practice all the skills or just the environmental skills that come with that. What it means to be on a plane, what you’re gonna see or hear on a plane. Because the last thing you want is to book a flight with a student who has any sort sensory needs: you get an hour in a 3-hour flight and they have a meltdown, so the fact that you could work on practicing on that environment…
Or even practicing in a busy classroom! I’ve known a lot of kids through ABA that could do every skill that you have them do, it’s all mastered and generalized around their house, and then you put them in a classroom and it’s like they don’t know what you’re asking them at all, because there’s more distractors around, there’s other students around, there’s toys to look at… Having them practice in an environment where you can actually up the distraction… The class environment [in VR] right now is very peaceful very nice, but I love the idea that you could populate these bookshelves with books, you could put kids learning at the table, you could have classroom background noise going on, you could gradually increase the distraction at the background until you reach a point where it’s very similar to an actual classroom, at which point you could try to generalize to the natural environment. I think it’s a very cool aspect that we can’t really do right now, because you can’t start a student in an empty classroom and then bring one student in, then bring two students in, and then bring the classroom noise in… I think that’s something that would be really interesting for a lot of kids to do.
This is definitely a glimpse into what could be a very, very effective tool for a lot of our kids. We really love what you’re doing here, it’s fascinating and I could see a ton of potential in terms of what could be done on here. I’m happy to know that there’re teams that are working on things like this and working with this population in mind. I know there’s been a ton of development in VR and the kids that we work with don’t always have the opportunities to get to try things like this, so we appreciate what you guys are doing.
Luden.io thanks employees of Open Mind School for sharing their time, showing infinite curiosity and providing feedback for Rewire!
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