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How Was School Today FAQ

What is How Was School Today trying to do?

• Our goal is to help children who cannot speak (or who have very limited speech) tell simple stories about their day at school, to parents, carers, and teachers. In this project we are focusing on children with cerebral palsy.

Why are we doing this?

• Children with severe language and communication limitations find it very difficult to have conversations with people, instead they are often limited to passively responding to questions ("yes", "no", etc), or communicating simple needs (such as "I am hungry"). This limits their communication and self-confidence, and in the long term (as adults) can lead to social isolation.
• Our long-term vision is to develop a suite of tools, which can be used by children and adults of varying levels of disability, which help people engage in social conversation and story telling, and which also help teachers and therapists teach these skills. If successful, we believe this will lead to major quality of life improvements for people with major communication disabilities, and also for their parents, family members, and friends.

How does How Was School Today Work?

• Sensors track the location of the children in their school, and also who they interact with and (to a limited extent) what they do. The computer software distills from this data a simple story about the child's day, using artificial intelligence and natural language generation techniques. A user interface then lets the child to edit the story (for example taking out things he or she doesn't want to talk about, and adding comments like "This was fun"), and then to tell it a parent or other adult.

What is the status of How Was School Today?

• Some media reports suggest that the system is complete and ready to be used throughout Scotland or the UK. This is not true, unfortunately. We need to spend at least another two years on research and development before this can happen. We need to make the system more robust, reduce the amount of technical support required, give the children more control over the stories (including the type of language as well as the content), adapt our interfaces so they can be more easily used by children with varying levels of impairment, etc, etc. We also need to test the system on more children, for longer periods of time, to assess long-term impact.

Who is involved in How Was School Today?

• How Was School Today is a collaboration between the University of Dundee, the University of Aberdeen, Capability Scotland, and Communication Matters. It has been primarily funded by the EPSRC/RCUK Digital Economy programme.

How can I get more information?

• The best source is the academic papers on our website

Links

Our Voice

Our software now speaks using the unique Heather Scottish voice by CereProc. The voice has quickly become very poplular on VOCAs (Voice Output Communication Aids) in Scotland.

Our Logo

For our logo I used two icons from the Nuvola icon theme for KDE 3.x by David Vignoni (http://icon-king.com/?p=15). I found them at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Nuvola.

The idea is that normally a school diary is used to communicate to the people at home what happened during a school day. And in our project we will design a prototype that allows the child to tell their own story using the new device.