Month: January 2018

Week 2 is in the books! This week our team continued to put our heads together to come up with some fabulous ideas for our project. The conversations centered around some interesting topics: effectiveness vs. accessibility, the potential of VR as an empathy machine, games vs. experience, and transformational goals. As a public school, Beech Bottom Primary does not have immediate access to the latest and greatest technology showpieces, so we've been thinking long and hard about how to balance our desire to leverage the powerful platforms that are now available to us as developers, while still making something that will be eminently usable by children in public schools. [caption id="attachment_20" align="alignnone" width="660"] Brainstormin'[/caption] The vast majority of technical projects working towards increasing empathy for autistic people has focused on…

Welcome to the Prism development blog! Each week, we'll be posting some behind-the-scenes looks into what we've been up to throughout the development process. During this first week, our team met with our clients at Beech Bottom Primary School in Brooke County, West Virginia, to talk about what they hoped to achieve from this project. [caption id="attachment_17" align="alignnone" width="660"] The team discussing ideas with staff members at Beech Bottom Primary.[/caption] From our discussions, we learned that children at Beech Bottom (and presumably at schools across the country) are somewhat mystified by their autistic peers. Despite attempts at traditional sensitivity training, the neurotypical children have difficulty understanding why their classmates on the autism spectrum will exhibit certain behaviors that, on the surface, appear unusual or disturbing. This will, unfortunately, frequently lead to…