Final Blog: Hello again! Unfortunately, this will be our last blog post. We just had the forum and we think we did really well! We all did a very good job of spreading the word about Down Syndrome and our idea. Everybody who came to our station said they thought it was a great idea and we should definitely continue on it in the future! The data we took for the forum is on Down Syndrome children and their visual learning. We learned from the data that children with Down Syndrome learn 38% more with visual aids than without. We hope that we can work on this idea in the future and help more children with Down Syndrome learn and feel more welcome in their learning environment. For now, goodbye!
Week Five: Hey everyone! This week our group worked on completing the power point poster. It looks great and we are very excited to show it off to everybody during the final presentation. The only bump in the tracks for the poster is that we haven't even done the plan yet for the books! We had no graph to show, so we had to find research off the internet and make a graph based on the research we found. We also reached out to a bunch of Down Syndrome Schools and asked them to take part in our project by getting their student to read the book for us and take a quiz so we can see the level of improvement by reading the prototype book other than the original book. They said yes, but unfortunately, the only time they had for it was in 4 months! So we had to find an alternative to get data. I eventually reached out to my friend who has a brother with Down Syndrome, and she will try to get in touch with the school he goes to and help us out a ton. We have put a lot of hard work into the prototype for the book, and we will continue to work on the prototype and try to get it to the best quality before the deadline.
Week Four: Hello everybody! This week our group got the art teachers Katie Thoma and Christina Hendershaw to help us with the illustrations for the book. We also contacted Kevin’s friend Maggie Dahn and asked for her to help us. She got back to us saying that she would ask her college students to help, but hasn't said anything yet. We contacted the publishers for “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes”, and like every other publisher we contacted, we didn't get the permission. The fact that we haven't got permission for every book we've tried drastically changed our plans. Our main plan now is to grab the book “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes” and scan it. Using the scanned pages, we will add the illustrations that we got from Katie and Christina, and eventually make the masterpiece we see in our heads now.
Week Three: Hello again! This week, our group talked to an art teacher at Windward about illustrating books for our application. We made a list of books that we wanted on the app and illustrated. The series we are hoping to use is Magic Treehouse books by Mary Pope Osborne. We picked out the first 10 books of the series, and we are going to try to get schools from all around California (including Windward) to help out illustrating them. The first 10 books are just a starting point, and if we are successful in getting the other schools, then we will add more books for us to read and summarize for them the illustrate. We want to get schools all around the state to help illustrate books for young Down Syndrome children. Our main goal is to make this a statewide “thing” to illustrate books for children with learning disabilities, not only Down Syndrome. We also emailed Jim Bologna and asked about the making of the app. He said that there was a website that could help us make the app called MAD-learn. We haven't worked out how to use the website yet, but we're sure Jim can help us out with that. That’s what we've done this week!
Week Five: Hey everyone! This week our group worked on completing the power point poster. It looks great and we are very excited to show it off to everybody during the final presentation. The only bump in the tracks for the poster is that we haven't even done the plan yet for the books! We had no graph to show, so we had to find research off the internet and make a graph based on the research we found. We also reached out to a bunch of Down Syndrome Schools and asked them to take part in our project by getting their student to read the book for us and take a quiz so we can see the level of improvement by reading the prototype book other than the original book. They said yes, but unfortunately, the only time they had for it was in 4 months! So we had to find an alternative to get data. I eventually reached out to my friend who has a brother with Down Syndrome, and she will try to get in touch with the school he goes to and help us out a ton. We have put a lot of hard work into the prototype for the book, and we will continue to work on the prototype and try to get it to the best quality before the deadline.
Week Four: Hello everybody! This week our group got the art teachers Katie Thoma and Christina Hendershaw to help us with the illustrations for the book. We also contacted Kevin’s friend Maggie Dahn and asked for her to help us. She got back to us saying that she would ask her college students to help, but hasn't said anything yet. We contacted the publishers for “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes”, and like every other publisher we contacted, we didn't get the permission. The fact that we haven't got permission for every book we've tried drastically changed our plans. Our main plan now is to grab the book “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes” and scan it. Using the scanned pages, we will add the illustrations that we got from Katie and Christina, and eventually make the masterpiece we see in our heads now.
Week Three: Hello again! This week, our group talked to an art teacher at Windward about illustrating books for our application. We made a list of books that we wanted on the app and illustrated. The series we are hoping to use is Magic Treehouse books by Mary Pope Osborne. We picked out the first 10 books of the series, and we are going to try to get schools from all around California (including Windward) to help out illustrating them. The first 10 books are just a starting point, and if we are successful in getting the other schools, then we will add more books for us to read and summarize for them the illustrate. We want to get schools all around the state to help illustrate books for young Down Syndrome children. Our main goal is to make this a statewide “thing” to illustrate books for children with learning disabilities, not only Down Syndrome. We also emailed Jim Bologna and asked about the making of the app. He said that there was a website that could help us make the app called MAD-learn. We haven't worked out how to use the website yet, but we're sure Jim can help us out with that. That’s what we've done this week!
Week Two: Hey everybody! For the second week, we got a lot of work done. We finally came up with a solution! Our solution to Down Syndrome patients is an IPhone and IPad application. Our main idea is to create an app for 8-12 year olds with Down Syndrome to help them learn reading, and feel more welcome in their learning environment. Young children with Down Syndrome have trouble learning in the same age level of their other classmates, and have the most trouble in learning to read. The app will hold books from a publishing company that we have contacted, and illustrations courtesy of the art teacher and her students. The books will be at the same reading level as the children at 8-12 years (no pictures mostly), but the illustrations will help the Down Syndrome children learn to read, and read at the same reading level as their classmates. Not only will this help children with Down Syndrome, but it will also help younger children (4-8) to learn to read at a higher reading level, and learn vocabulary that children their age wouldn't normally have!
Week One: Hello everyone! To start off our CBL project blogging we are going to tell you a little bit about Down Syndrome and why we chose it as our topic. When our group was first assigned together we were given the option of having allergies as our topic. We immediately all turned that topic away and picked our top three choices. Our choices were: Autism, Diabetes, and Down Syndrome. After a day, three of us decided we wanted to do Down syndrome but one group member was stuck on diabetes, so we had to convince him to change his mind. Then we came to the conclusion that we were going to study Down Syndrome. Down Syndrome is a genetic chromosome 21 disorder that can cause developmental disorders and reasoning/understanding (intellectual) delays. The main form of Down syndrome is called trisomy 21 but there are other forms that are not as common. So far our group has only done a small amount of research since it is only the first week of our project. However, we already have many questions that keep coming up in the little searching that we have done. We have learned that people with Down Syndrome often have a higher risk of developing other medical conditions. Also, the life expectancy has increased in recent decades from 25 to 60 years. In 2012 it was reported that 400,000 people had Down Syndrome in the United States. We are assuming that number has risen by a lot due to the United States becoming more and more over populated. We are all very excited to learn as much as we can about Down Syndrome during our project and we hope you will come along and join us on our journey!