How was School today...? in the Wild
Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) can provide access to computerised speech output for children who have little or no speech and varying difficulty in understanding language. This can be due to some form of physical and/or intellectual disability, such as cerebral palsy or developmental delay. Computer based speech generating AAC devices which provide access to pre-stored words, phrases and sentences are well suited to communicate needs and wants (such as I am thirsty). However, they do not well support more complex interactions such as conversational narrative (guess what happened to me today) and social dialogue (e.g., pub chats about football). Not only are these interactions essential for building vocabulary and general language acquisition; they form an essential part of the process of making and sustaining friendships and other social relationships. Indeed, social isolation is a major quality-of-life issue amongst people with communication impairment.
Our goal is to develop AAC tools that support story-telling and social dialogue. As a step towards this vision, we constructed a proof-of-concept system for helping children with communication disabilities to construct and tell stories about their day at school; this was supported by the Digital Economy Feasibility Study programme (EP/F066880/1; EP/F067151/1). We deployed sensors to track the children’s location, activities, and interactions; created a natural language generation data-to-text system which generated a draft story from this data; and built tools which allowed the children to edit and interactively narrate the stories.
This project seeks to investigate the issues identified in the feasibility study in order to create an improved prototype system which we will trial for five months, not just one week as in the “How was School Today...?” project. By its nature this work must be carried out in close collaboration with the children and their school; we will embed ourselves in the environment in order to fully investigate the reality of implementing and using such a system – to a much greater extent than we did in the feasibility study during which we were able to focus on technological challenges. We will work with staff, parents and children to understand their perspectives, the impact of diversity in the children, and the practicalities of technical support in a school environment – a task we believe truly deserves to be called “research in the wild”.
The main partners in the “How was School today...? in the Wild” project are Dundee University's School Computing, Aberdeen University's Department of Computing Science and Capability Scotland.
Funder: EPSRC
Start Date: 01/01/2010
End Date: 30/06/2011
Research Themes:
For further information about the How was School today...? in the Wild project please contact Dr Annalu Waller.
Or visit the website at: http://www.computing.dundee.ac.uk/projects/howwasschooltoday/