NYC District 75 public school Field Trip

This is almost first time that I’ve ever visited any public school.
Even though the field trip was not long enough to experience every
single inches of the public school, it was enough to get an general
ideas of it.

First impression of the class was the number of teachers in the class.
Every single kids were matched up with each teachers, which gave me
a sense that they need a different care for each child.
All of classes I have watched seems to be designed to educate
children’s ability for social skills and brain activities. For instance,
dancing with music, reciting after teachers, practicing basic math.

After finishing our tour, one of the instructor showed us some of the
tools that are designed to use for those kids. It seems not to be
extremely complicated, but since they have to be customized to a child,
it costs to much. However, to be honest, I think we can make something
cheap and nice with our skill sets and facilities.

-> This is a table for children who are not able to recognize the food
on the flat table. So, the instructor designed this and it worked.
For me, it is a kind of objects we are creating everyday at ITP.
I would love to hear their need and figure out
what they need, and what we can offer for them.

And here is the another thing that inspired me.
This is a smartboard in the class, and it is such a nice board
to have them as it can project without physical interruption.
However, because of the high price, smartboard was not provided
to every classroom. There was another classroom with regular project
hanging on the top and interrupted by the position of child or teacher.
What if we can make a sort of tool that can distort the projection
to make it like smartboard-like projection? Either regular projector
can be installed closer to the projection board and the projection image
can be customized to the angle view by using After Effect. It wouldn’t
cost much and should help them have better presentation for kids.

When I first heard of ” Assistive technologies”, my initial assumption
was something very technical, but it turned out not to be true at least to me.
I would like to develop a tool for them not using highly technical, but using
low-tech that could be met their needs!