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Hertfordshire Special Schools Data Harvest Project

Autumn 2004

St. Lukes and Watling View Schools

St. Luke’s School in Redbourn is a school for children with Moderate Learning Difficulties (MLD) in the 10 – 16 age range. There are approximately 150 students in the school. Watling View School in St. Albans is a school for children and young adults with Severe Learning Difficulties (SLD), with pupils and students aged between nursery age and 19. There are currently 86 pupils/students on role.

Whilst the students at these schools have very different levels of learning difficulty and a wide variety of disabilities, in both cases the concepts involved in Flowol and the interface used in the software is too complicated for most of them to grasp. Of the SLD students at Watling View, only 1 or 2 in the whole school would be able to understand this sort of concept at all. At St. Lukes, with more able MLD learners, there is more potential, though this is limited as the software stands.

A small section would be able to understand using a flow chart to turn an output on and off, with a delay between these 2 actions occurring, but using decisions would be beyond their grasp in most cases. In order to help them understand the concept of the symbols and their effect we suggested making large laminated cards, cut to the shape of each symbol and labelled with the ‘effect’ of that symbol, eg a large rectangle with ‘Delay’ written on it. Simple flowcharts can then be created on the classroom floor, with the children using a device such as a torch as the output. A student could then ‘walk’ the flowchart with the device, switching it on and off as the flowchart commands. This would help the students learn the concepts before applying them on the computer.

The majority of the mimics supplied with Flowol contain more than one output, which would also make the overall process of creating a control program too complex a task at these schools. However, using Mimic Creator I made some simplified mimics using clipart, which I modified in a image editor. A flowchart could then be made with a simple on/off routine.

In order for the Flowol software to be suitable in the Special Needs environments we work in I would suggest simplifying the toolbar to include only Start/Stop, Output and Process. The students could then use simplified mimics to build the basic Start – Turn on – Delay – Turn off – Stop routine. I would also suggest giving each symbol a different colour and enlarging the buttons to create an overall simpler interface.

Woodfield School

During 2004 Woodfield School participated in a project to evaluate Data Harvest Flowol 2 software and hardware for use in Special Schools. We looked at Flowol 2 software and the Mimic creator software along with a Flowgo control unit.

The software was easy to install and the supplied manuals provided the right level of detail. The USB connected Flowgo control box was also very easy to install.

Flowol 2

The Flowol 2 software would be far too advanced for our pupils in it’s current form. Our pupils would not understand the process of creating the ‘program’. From a teaching perspective it was difficult to see why we would teach them.

It would be very difficult to relate it to something that would useful for them as an adult.

We felt that for our pupils it would work better if they could create the working model first and then reproduce it in the software.

We liked the graphical nature of the Flowol software but felt that more use could have been made of colour. For example, each item on the tool bar could be a different colour. The terminology was too difficult for our pupils.

It would make more sense to them if for example, the process box was called ’ doing’ and the decision box was called ‘yes/no’. We also found drawing the lines on our programs was sometimes awkward. It was not possible to see a very large part of the program, only a few ‘boxes’ were visible on the screen at any one time. Our pupils are familiar with using symbols and the introduction of these would make it easier for them to use the product.

Flowol Mimic Creator

We felt that the pre designed mimics were not suitable for our pupils. The mimic creator software was good and it would allow more suitable mimics to be produced. Again it was felt that the creation of the mimics would be too difficult for most of our pupils.

Flowgo

The Flowgo was easy to connect to the various models, but we felt that the models as supplied were not very strong and would be easily damaged.