Games can be fun, but when used in the right venue, they can be educational as well. Marty Schultz, Founder of Blindfold Games and Co-Founder of Objective Ed, traveled to CSUN to receive the Touch of Genius award
From National Braille Press for his work in providing new game based tools for Education. In this interview Marty tells Shelly the inspiration for Objective Ed and how it grew out of the success of Blindfold Games. He outlines the concepts behind the skill training aspects of some of the game s mechanics while noting that he hopes the ability to customize the program might lead to teachers creating a repository of lessons for students. Visit the Objective Ed website to learn more about this project And fans of Marty s Blindfold Games work should keep reading that site
too as new games are on the horizon.
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Transcript
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Hide transcriptTranscribed By Grecia Ramirez
Direct from Anaheim, it’s blindbargains.com coverage of CSUN 2019, brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology; Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings; access technology book reviews and mobile apps and how they can enhance entertainment, education, and employment, log onto AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind’s free monthly online technology magazine, www.afb.org/aw.
Now, here’s Shelly Brisbin.
SHELLY BRISBIN: Hello, and welcome to Blind Bargains. I’m at CSUN 2019, talking with Marty Schultz, the founder of Blindfold games. You’ll probably know him from that endeavor, but he has a new project to tell us about.
Welcome, Marty.
MARTY SCHULTZ: Oh. Thank you for inviting me.
SB: My pleasure. I ran into you last night, and you were being honored with the Touch of Genius award from National Braille Press, and that’s a story in and of itself I want to get to. But tell us about this new project, Objective Ed.
MS: So Objective Ed. is really a growth out of Blindfold games. About a year ago, I start hearing from several TVIs such as Diane Browner, and she mentioned that she’s using some of the games to teach different types of ONM or literacy skills to some of her students. And she writes for Perkins Path Technologies, and she had been mentioning a couple of the games such as Blindfold Barnyard, Blindfold Bowling, Blindfold Racer. And in doing so, she said, these games are really good to teach skills.
So about six months ago, or almost a year ago now -- I decide to look into it a little further, and I met with a number of organizations and schools for the blind. And I said, does it make sense for me to start focusing on building games for visually impaired students to help them develop skills? And everyone that I spoke to said, that’s a good idea.
So the next thing I did was I went out to the AER convention in Reno. And I would go up to the teachers there, and I said, have you heard of Blindfold games? If they had, I’d say, well, do you use them with your students? If they did, I said, well, can I talk to you about it for five or ten minutes, because I’d really like to understand why they’re helping you.
And I learned three things: Firstly, they said they – Blindfold games are a great reward for their students. And if the student does the right thing – shows the right behavior or does the lesson and puts forth the effort, the teacher would let the student use the game as a reward.
Secondly, I learned that many of these teachers are itinerate teachers, meaning they visit the student once a week or every two weeks or once a month, and they teach the student some skill, maybe in orientation and mobility skill. And they come back a week later and they find that the student really hasn’t progressed. That’s because the parent didn’t have enough time to practice with the student or the regular everyday teacher didn’t spend the time working with the student on those type of skills. When the itinerate ONM teacher or TBI would use a Blindfold game that exercised that skill, when she came back the following week, the student had played the game so much that the student actually acquired the skill and the teacher could move on to the next lesson instead of repeating that lesson over again.
And then, thirdly, I found out that since these are audio games and the visually impaired students are very good at audio games, they became a leader in a lot of social situations amongst their sighted peers. Normally, they’re a follower and following the sighted peers about how to play different games. Here, they were leading because they were so much better at the game and they were able to show their friends exactly how to play.
And we said, that’s really interesting. Let’s now put together the framework to start up a new company that will focus on games that teach skills for visually impaired students. And we launched the company in August. We have a set of game designers working for us, and we’re starting to come out with our first few games now.
SB: So let me ask you real quick: What are some of the skills that people got from Blindfold games that translate best to education?
MS: Well, the one Diane talks about the most is directionality, be it left versus right or clock directions or compass directions. In the game, Blindfold Barnyard, the idea is that you put your finger anywhere on the screen and it’ll tell you where one of the animals are, say, the cow. And it’ll say, when you touch your finger to the screen, it’ll say the cow is at 2 o’clock. As you move your finger towards the cow, eventually, you get to the cow, and then the cow starts moving. Then, you have to move the cow to the fence where the other cows are collecting. So let’s say you move it to the east fence, and when you get to the east fence, the cow remains on that fence. Now, had you brought a horse to that east fence where all the cows are collecting, that cow and all the other horses would scatter and run away. And that was a lot of fun because the more animals you collect on a fence, the more points you get.
We took an analogy of that and used that game in our new Objective Ed. games to teach directionality. So it starts as simply swiping left and right and up and down, and as the student gets better and better, moves onto both clock directions and eventually compass directions. And the nice thing about the games that we’re building in Objective Ed is not only are the games as much fun as the Blindfold games, but they get harder as you move forward, and the student’s progress is actually stored up in a web-based dashboard.
SB: Are they also learning to be better mobile device users, or is it taken for granted that they’re probably pretty good with the gadgets already, you know, VoiceOver and those skills that they need to make the devices work the way they should?
MS: We actually built two games to teach that type of assistive technology. One is based on the Blindfold game, Bop Gesture, where we teach the VoiceOver skills, and the other is based on the game, Simon, where you have to repeat a set of instructions and those gestures get longer and longer and longer. And between using those two games, starting out with no knowledge of gestures, you can move yourself all the way up to actually operating the rotor very competently.
SB: Well, let’s talk about Objective Ed., because you’re not just putting games out in the app store for people to buy and put an educational situations. You’ve got, kind of, a unique approach. So talk about how the structure of the company and the games are organized.
MS: Sure. So the purpose of this company is really to provide the tools for teachers to, not teach these skills to students, but instead provide ways the students can practice the skills. And what we’ve noticed, whether it’s an orientation and mobility skill like the clock directions we talked about or using the phone to tell you what direction to turn in or what actions to take or -- our new invention that we actually won the Touch of Genius Louis Braille award from the National Braille Press, which lets you put a sheet of Braille on an iPad and we actually know what’s on that Braille sheet. So as you read the Braille with your fingers, the game can operate alongside of you.
So unlike Blindfold games, where we sold all the games through the app store – actually, they’re free to download and they have upgrades that go anywhere from 3 to about 10 dollars – Objective Ed. is focusing on providing the tools to teachers and providing the product to school systems so they can buy them on behalf of those teachers. And we’re building an infrastructure where not only can teachers use these games effectively to teach skills, but they can create their own content for a lot of these games and then share them with other teachers all across the United States.
SB: So how does that work? You recently received the National Braille Press Touch of Genius award for a pretty interesting concept whereby you combine the Braille and the iPad. So describe that and how it works.
MS: Sure. Well, that’s – that invention is called Braille Sheets. And you take an ordinary sheet of Braille and you put it on an iPad, and our technology can figure out exactly what’s on that Braille sheet. So as you read your Braille with your fingers, it actually can speak the Braille along with you. Or you can have a game that’s based on that Braille sheet. So let’s say it’s the Hangman game where you have a Braille sheet consisting of the letters from A to Z, and you’d fill up the hangman by touching that Braille character on a piece of paper that sits on the iPad.
One variant of that game is instead of the letters being arranged A to Z, we can actually arrange the letters the same way as the standard QWERTY keyboard. That gives us the opportunity for the student to play Hangman, learn the QWERTY keyboard at the same time, knowing that it’s actually Braille keys that they’ll be touching.
SB: And you’re developing some of these games yourself, but you’re also making it possible for teachers to share games that they might create; right?
MS: Exactly. So let’s say a student is learning the AR contraction, and a teacher has a student, and this student really loves horses. So the example I like to use is the teacher would write a short story about horses and include the word, "barn” in the story. And then the teacher would also put in a set of audio questions. And one of the questions of the story would be, “where does the horse sleep at night?”
So the child would read this story and get to the word, “barn” that's contracted and then double-tap the screen. The teacher could write any story she wants, and she can have any set of audio questions she wants. She could also store this up in our repository in the cloud.
Now, let’s say there’s another teacher in Seattle, and he has a student who also likes horses and is at the same level of contractions. He can download the first story that the first teacher created, print out the corresponding Braille sheet, and give it to his student to practice at home.
Thereby, teachers will be creating content across a wide variety of subjects, Braille sheets, or any number of other ideas that our games will support – maybe it’ll be a Jeopardy-like game that might have history facts or dozens of other ideas. And teachers can share all their content with each other and download it and use it for their own students.
SB: And how does that work for the teacher that would want to buy into this system? Do they buy the games individually? Do they pay a subscription to you? How are you funding – how are they funding that?
MS: Well, we haven’t set the price on the games, but it’ll be done on an annual basis where there’s a per-student fee, and the student will log in and play the games that the teacher has assigned to that student. And the teacher will have her own account.
SB: So a school district or a teacher would get an account and they could use it with however many students that they had, but they would need to first, sort of, essentially, get a subscription to the Objective Ed. products?
MS: Right. And with the Objective Ed. products, they get all the games, not just the Objective Ed. games, but they’d also get the Blindfold Entertainment games and have access. And they can control exactly what games a given student can use, how much entertainment they can have a day within the Blindfold games, and what specific skills they’re working on. And based on those skills for that student, those other games would also pop up.
SB: Are you making educational guides or manuals for the teachers to give them a sense of what kind of skills people can develop with what games?
MS: Yes, we are. And we’re looking at a lot of the state standards for picking out the most common skills so it’s really easy. And then, if teachers decide, okay. I’m teaching my student a different set of skills, and I think this game combination works, she can actually put her ideas up in this repository and share it with other people. There’s a little social network that’s going on the side of this at the same time. So any teacher could really search for any concept, like I need a story about horses with contractions, so she might search for hashtag “horse” or hashtag “contractions”.
SB: Very cool. So how far along are you in the process? When will people start being able to get these games?
MS: We’re opening up early testing for teachers, both TVIs and assistive technology experts and ONMs, within the next couple of weeks. And if people want to – if you’re a teacher and you want to join in the initial testing, please send me an Email.
SB: So I’ll ask you to give contact information in a second, but is there anything we didn’t cover that we should talk about?
MS: Well, we, right now, have about 300 teachers who are very excited to see this move forward. We’re working with a number of schools for the blind, and we’re constantly looking for suggestions from teachers on what kind of skills they want to teach and what ideas they have for games so that we can implement them. We see ourselves as very competent game designers, and we’re looking for guidance from the community of what we should build next.
SB: And what’s the status, just quickly, of Blindfold games? Are you going to continue to develop new ones, or – you’re up to about 80 now?
MS: Yeah. We’re up to about 80 games or so. I’m not as active in developing the games as I used to because I’m busy running around the country giving talks. For example, this week, I’m at CSUN. Last week, I was at, I think, North Carolina AER. The week before that, I was at Virginia AER. The week before that, I was in Illinois AER. In two weeks, I’m at Texas AER. So I’m getting a lot of travel, which doesn’t give me a lot of time to build out more games, but I still have a few more in the hopper. And once this round of travel’s over, I can get back to building a couple cool games.
SB: All right. Have people got requests in to you? Do you know what -- you want to say what those are going to be, or do you just want to wait till they are ready?
MS: I’ll wait till they’re ready. I think my wish list for games is probably about 300 games long.
SB: I’m sure. And they’re – because they’re sort of deceptively simple. It’s like, oh. I wouldn’t have thought of making that into a game, but you’ve done those things, so –
MS: Yeah. And what’s challenging for me is getting the ideas from people and then running it by all the testers. I have about 50 testers worldwide who are visually impaired. And they’ll either tell me whether they think the game will be successful or not. And if it is, I’ll put out a version, they’ll rip it apart, I’ll put out a new version, they’ll rip it apart. And after two or three months or so, we have a – usually, a pretty good game.
SB: Right. So tell people who want to find out more about Objective Ed. where they can – you mentioned Email, but is there a website? Where should people go?
MS: Yes. They can visit our website, which is objectiveed.com. They can send me an Email. It’s Marty@objectiveed.com. And I still respond to my regular Email, which is Marty@blindfoldgames.org, and the blindfoldgames.org website is also up there. And then, it has a full list of the 80 games.
SB: Sounds great. Thanks so much for coming on Blind Bargains.
MS: Well, thank you for inviting me.
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Joe Steinkamp is no stranger to the world of technology, having been a user of video magnification and blindness related electronic devices since 1979. Joe has worked in radio, retail management and Vocational Rehabilitation for blind and low vision individuals in Texas. He has been writing about the A.T. Industry for 15 years and podcasting about it for almost a decade.
