[starlogo-users] starlogo for autistic kids

[Eric Klopfer]

Hi arun

This sounds like fantastic work you're involved in.  I'll check out the video.

You might be interested in openstarlogo (http://education.mit.edu/openstarlogo).  This open source version of starlogo would allow you to make changes to the code if you desired.  I know it isn't the best documented code, so if you start and need help just let us know.

That version already includes one feature that the other doesn't - the ability to lock the position of buttons.  Even the precompiled binary version of openstarlogo has that feature (I added it myself, which is one of my few code contributions :-)  

we will eventually be releasing the blocks portion of starlogo-tng (http://education.mit.edu/starlogo-tng) as open source and at that time it may be useful to connect the blocks with openstarlogo.

Hope this helps.

Eric

----- Original Message -----
From: "Arun Mehta" <arunlists at gmail.com>
To: starlogo-users at media.mit.edu
Sent: Wednesday, March 7, 2007 9:32:17 PM (GMT-0500) America/New_York
Subject: [starlogo-users] starlogo for autistic kids

Hi, I'm Arun Mehta, living in New Delhi and Radaur (Haryana), I teach
programming to engineering students, and have run programming
workshops at the National Association for the Blind in Delhi.I wrote
eLocutor, the free software that allows persons with extreme motor
disability to type.

If you have the time (27 minutes), please take a look at
http://shortfilmindia.com/ShortAforautism..MforMouse.html , a
documentary film about autism filmed around a workshop I led, in which
I attempted to use starlogo to get autistic kids seriously interested
in computers. We loved it, of course, but...

The kids had serious sensory issues. For some, the glare of the
monitor was quite overpowering. It would help if we had greater
control over foreground and background color, font size etc in the
buttons and sliders.

Then, touch was a problem too. Some kids would click the mouse over a
button, but not release it, thus dragging the button, instead of
clicking it. I got quite used to finding all the controls in the
bottom left of the screen with one kid. Is there some way to freeze
the position of the controls?

Having to spell large words in English while writing code in starlogo
was also a problem. Are there special keyboards available for
starlogo?

Are you aware of others using starlogo in working with autistic kids?

Warmly,
Arun
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