Parallel Play

Parallel play

Parallel play is when two children are playing the same play frame, but not collaborating with one another or influencing one another’s play directly.

Rather than through negotiation, the two children’s play frames are synchronized and coordinated by imitation. You often see one child repeating the same action that another child does. (Classic Vygotsky: the play frame is in their ZPD and they are learning how to act in it from one another).

This poses problems for kids with disabilities: #1: their motor and linguistic capacity to imitate.

Can our kid actually perform the physical actions of driving the car up the ramp or putting a dress on Barbie? This is a problem (but is a little out of my universe as an SLP. I’ll let the OT and Rec Therapists work on this one).

Can a child using AAC imitate something that another child says that sounds interesting?

No.

Metaplay 2—on the use of drama as play

Last post I talked about metaplay as an important type of language output that is particularly difficult to program into AAC due to its unpredictability and dynamicism.

The imaginary reality that children are engaging in is referred to as a play frame. The play frame can be something established and obvious (I’ll call these “off-the-rack frames”) or it can be something improvised in the moment. If the children are playing House, that’s mostly an off-the-rack frame that we can mostly prepare for. If the House gets overrun by zombies (or worse, as my 7-year-old cousin decided, zombies piloting robot armor suits) our off-the-rack AAC programming for the House frame is going to be inadequate.

The end goal here is to make the AAC system programmed by the players as part of the play. Play frames are co-constructed, so talk about the play frames needs to be co-constructed as well.The action in the play itself programs the device.

I'm the store worker, okay? Pretend you're buying something from me.

And, no, I haven’t the foggiest idea how to implement that in the Real World™. I’ve talked to the foremost experts in the field of AAC and none of them know how either (if they think about it at all). It certainly isn’t possible with the hardware and software available today, nor do current attitudes regarding AAC held by professionals doing the teaching lend themselves to implementing something this radical.

I do have some ideas for how we can structure an off-the-rack schematic setup in an existing AAC system. Here is something that you can use today to make a schematic theme for play within a specific play frame.

Metaplay

Disclaimer: Please excuse the half-formed randomness in this post

Imaginary play shares a lot of features with improvisational theater. It is an emerging narrative that no one participant controls, turns are dynamic and responsive from moment-to-moment, and, most frustrating to programming AAC, the meaning of any action may change as the result of future actions!

Example:

Children are playing in dressup area:

Child 1: takes coat from coat rack and puts it on.

Child 2: Are you going to work? Have a nice day.

Same scene, different narrative:

Children are playing in dressup area:

Child 1: takes coat from coat rack and puts it on.

Child 2: That’s on sale today. Eleventeen percent off.

One child initiates an action and the second child defines the meaning of that action. This is why “scripts” in an AAC system can’t work. A child needs to be able to keep up with an uncertain, unfolding narrative. If the first child had an AAC system, if that system was set for “playing house,” it would be useless in crafting a response to Child 2 in the second example.

Brain-controlled scanning

Okay, when I talk about “jet-packs and flying cars” in The Future, this is what I’m  talking about. This looks like a wheelchair, but it’s really a brain-controlled robot.

I love the addition of a semi-autonomous system to drive between scanning activations. The cognitive load of concentrating constantly would be exhausting, but this is more feasible.

http://webdiis.unizar.es/~jminguez/wheelchair/

This scanning method can be made to operate a communication system, too.

Book on Universal Design

O’Reilly is one of the most important publishing companies out there right now. They print the books that techies read and refer to in order to keep the world’s IT systems, networks and applications running. Their Linux books were a godsend when I was in grad school.

Here is a new book in their product line:

And a website for the book.

I hate, hate, hate web things that use Flash for navigation, or buttons that are gif images without alt-text—and I don’t have a disability. Imagine trying to use a such a site with a sip-and-puff switch, or read it with a text-to-speech reader. It doesn’t work. And this can make it miserable for people trying to buy things online, research information, or participate in 21st century social/cultural events (which are increasingly virtual in scope).

Web designers should read this book and O’Reilly is commended for publishing it. I hope they expand and improve it for a second edition in the future, even.

Braille e-book

http://www.yankodesign.com/2009/04/17/braille-e-book/

This isn’t out on the market yet, but this is a promising design.

Youngest person ever with carbon-fiber legs

http://www.echo-news.co.uk/news/4290002.Brave_girl_Ellie_May_has_a_spring_in_her_step/

This goes in the design and society blog because it really shows how far we’ve come in our attitudes toward disability. Prosthetic legs used to be designed to conceal the fact that they were prosthetic. Never mind that their design wasn’t much good for anything except sitting down and looking “normal.”

Ellie May’s prosthetics don’t look like natural human legs at all and they don’t have to! They are her legs. We judge them based on their function, not appearance. They let her walk and play like her peers, without the hindering pretense of hiding her disability. We don’t have to do that anymore.

I’ll bet in the near future we are going to see more designs that serve useful functions without being tied to traditional forms. However, it is hard to break free of doing things the way we always have (I should know; it’s what we are trying to do with communication systems at Penn State right now.)

What play looks like.

I just saw two kids running around in circles chasing each other around a bike rack. Looked like a brother and sister, age 4 and 6 perhaps.

Repetitive, and pointless behavior.

They do it—it looks like silly play.

Our kids do it—it is perseveration that needs to be extinguished through behavior modification.

Think about that…

From the mouths of babes…

My former coworker just posted a great quote that her daughter said:

“Shark boy and Lava girl are incompatible.”

Clearly, she was referring to this

“Incompatible” is a pretty big word for a five year old. She has access to this sort of language so she can try it out. I wonder how much of her saying this was testing the word to explore what it means. (It’s in her Zone of Proximal Development)*

Compare this sentence to the average utterance in an AAC system. When was the last time you programmed something this interesting and complex into an AAC system? (I know I never have.)
The point of all of this is that kids won’t learn this sort of language unless they have access to it. Don’t wait until they are “ready” and then give it to them. Throw the kids into the deep end of the linguistic pool and let them construct their way out.

*(This little girl’s mother is a behavior analyst and probably doesn’t hold to the theory of ZPD or language construction, but that’s beside the point).

Disabilities in pop culture 7

I loved this scene from season 5 of Malcolm in the Middle.

Malcolm and Stevie

Stevie has stopped talking in this episode and is using an AAC device.

Would an AAC device in real life survive that sprinkler?

Stevie: (with computer) Thanks, Malcolm, that is what I really needed to hear.
Malcolm: Oh, good.
Stevie: (with computer) This thing sucks at sarcasm.

It’s funny because it’s true!